Felix Culpa
by Ninjagrrl
Summary: The felix culpa, or blessed fall. An attack from the Kyuubi leaves Itachi blind, his mind shattered and memories gone. Meanwhile, Kakashi is still recovering from the aftermath of a mission gone badly wrong.
1. Chapter 1

Felix Culpa

Author's Notes- An unhappy little fic that appeared when a drabble somehow ended up twenty-odd thousand words too long. It's a memory loss fic, although Itachi isn't going to wake up wide-eyed and naive with the mental age of a six year old, and people around him are not going to completely absolve him of all blame. There's currently ten chapters from start to finish, but I might slip a cheeky extra chapter in here or there, since I am enjoying writing it very much.

Any feedback at all is very, very welcome!

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended.

- - -

"Morning, old lady Tsunade."

Tsunade didn't jump, but her fingers twitched slightly on the stethoscope as Naruto's eyes opened. She nodded, favoured him with a small smile, and listened. His heart was thudding away, strong and sound as a sturdy little engine. After the massive damage he had sustained, Naruto shouldn't have woken for days. She wasn't surprised in the least.

Naruto stretched slightly, winced at some small pain and smiled up at her from under his bandages, a smile as weak and bright as dawn light breaking. "What happened?"

"The Kyuubi began to break loose," she said, and the smile faded slowly away. "I'm sorry, Naruto."

"How- wait," he said, frowning, and then he startled as his memories began to fall into place. "Did I hurt-"

"Jiraiya is fine, Naruto," Tsunade said, a little dryly. "We legendary sannin can take care of ourselves, thank you."

Naruto made a small, disbelieving sound, and rolled his eyes. The frown had not entirely smoothed out, perhaps remembering the last time it had happened and his mentor had almost died. Tsunade began to unwind a few of the bandages around his ribs, prodded gently, and was again unsurprised to feel the bone already knitting back together where it had shattered inwards under the dense chakra shield. Still tender, perhaps, not that Naruto would let it show in front of her.

She straightened, packing her stethoscope back into her bag. There was a small wrinkle between Naruto's eyebrows, still thinking, and then Tsunade was just quick enough to stop him as he tried to sit up. "Old lady, _he_ was there-!"

"I already know," she said. "Don't worry about him. He didn't hurt anyone" She gave Naruto a brief smile as she pulled the sheets back up over the bandages that pained her every time she saw them. The necklace flashed brilliant in the pale light, the central crystal as bright as a frozen teardrop, and she tucked it back safely underneath the covers.

"Hmph," Naruto already looked fully awake. "Sasuke better hurry back to the village soon, otherwise there's going to be none of his brother left for him." He gave her a confident smile that she returned, maybe only a second too late.

"You did well," she told him, and left it there.

Tsunade left the examining room, heavy medical bag swinging at her side. Shizune was tripping afterwards, her arms full of files and folders. It would be a long day for both of them, the start of many long days followed by short nights they would not be able to sleep through anyway.

"Yo," Kakashi said, appearing from nowhere to fall in line with Tsunade, book still in hand. His single visible eye did not lift from the pages as he weaved around a trolley, and stepped over a pile of files left carelessly outside one of the rooms.

"Naruto will be fine," Tsunade said, glancing sideways. "Are you going to see him?"

"Later," he said. "I'm escorting you now."

"You're on leave," she said, and watched him shrug, uninterested. A small wrinkle of displeasure formed between her eyebrows for a moment, and then smoothed away. Kakashi should not be here, and as a medic nin, she should _order_ him to stay home and rest. But Tsunade didn't know what else Kakashi lived for now. As far as she knew, there was no family, few acquaintances, and few real interests outside the mission.

An ANBU member was posted at the end of the hall, sleek and lean and genderless in uniform and pale fixed mask. Tsunade did not know who watched from behind those blank eyeholes. It nodded at her, then Kakashi, and moved silently aside.

"The hospital have taken all precautions," Shizune said, breaking the silence with a voice strung just a note too high. She was riffling through her files in the way that meant she was unsettled, running through the facts to reassure herself. It was not news to Tsunade. Itachi Uchiha would be sedated, chakra drained, ANBU members posted at the door- and those famous eyes locked away behind metal.

"They had to let one of the doctors in to stabilise his injuries," Shizune added. "Only one, and an ex-ANBU medic nin."

Any more staff allowed access, and they would risk an assassination. Although the only other known Uchiha was far from the village, there would be plenty more who saw Itachi as a threat too dangerous to let live. Tsunade could not blame anyone who did take action. Any information about Akatsuki or Orochimaru would be invaluable, but they already knew that they would not receive it.

"Stay, Shizune," she said at the door, throwing her arm out as her apprentice attempted to follow her into the room.

Shizune protested, and Tsunade relented. She was being cautious, and perhaps unnecessarily so. In a battle against the Uchiha, she'd hesitate to let even her very accomplished apprentice join her, but there was no real threat here.

When she had returned to the village and toured the hospital, Tsunade had appreciated how bright each of the rooms were. In her experience, patients needed light and air as much as they needed medication. During the war, they had to line their wounded up side by side in cellars and sheds and tents, anywhere they could find space to lay them out. In that suffocating, hopeless atmosphere, they had seemed to wilt and die like tropical flowers starved too long of sunlight, as though death circulated in that trapped air.

This was the only time she had seen a window shuttered, and the light blocked out altogether. It was unlikely that any ninja would pass by a room on the second floor of a hospital, but they had taken no chances. As the door opened, a single square of light fell into the dark room, a stark contrast to the bright autumn world outside. She breathed antiseptic, and for a moment, Tsunade could have been stepping into another miserable shelter thirty five years ago. Her hands still burned with the ghost-memories of hot arterial blood long spilled.

"I need light," she said, and the room blazed surgery-bright.

_Oh, Sasuke_ was her first thought, a wave of sadness breaking over her for the boy she had only known for such a short time. This was perhaps how he would look when they next met, when he was lost too far into his dreams of revenge. Sasuke had the same silky, blue-black hair that spilled like ink, the same elegant, narrow features emerging from the last of his baby fat. And perhaps one day, his Sharingan would reflect back all the blood he had spilled, and his eyes would be bruised black with exhaustion.

But now, Itachi's eyes weren't visible at all, lost behind a smooth sheet of metal locked into place. With the eyes covered, the rest of his face looked as smooth and expressionless as the mask of the ANBU guard.

"The injuries are stabilised," the ex-ANBU medic nin said quietly, rising from his chair.

"So it's just the sedative keeping him under?"

He hesitated. "As far as we know."

Tsunade knelt slowly, fingers rummaging surely through the small vials clipped into place in her bag. The contents gleamed jewel-bright, enough poisons there to kill a thousand men, and enough antidotes to bring them all back if she chose. She unwrapped a new needle and drew up half an inch of liquid that looked as clear and pure as fresh water. Shizune's fingers curled at her side, and Kakashi straightened minutely, from where he was leaning against the wall.

"I see," Tsunade said, and sank the needle into the bluish veins of Itachi's forearm.


	2. Chapter 2

Felix Culpa

Author's Notes- Uploaded two chapters at once, since the first is quite short and not much happens.

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

- - -

Itachi did not wake up a blank slate.

His factual memory was intact. He knew that the sky was blue, that fire burned, and that there had been another time before this one. He himself was ageless, faceless and nameless, but he had once existed somewhere before this.

It made no difference when the blindfold was removed. This world had no sight, but there had been sight once. He knew the blindness was unfamiliar, even though he could only picture things in abstract terms. He mentally ran through images and summoned them up one by one. An apple, a dog, a house, a sword. They sat isolated in space and time, sketched on white backgrounds and dissociated from any memories. The house was no building in particular, but something a child might produce if they were asked to draw a house. Four walls, four windows, a door. His mind did not sketch in details from any house he personally remembered. There were no toys scattered in the gardens and no familiar faces at the windows. When he opened the door, it opened onto the same flat white background he had pictured it on.

He acquired new memories that he came to know from this limited world. There were sensations. He could move his hands enough to skim over cool cotton sheets and rough bandages, and when he moved them too far, he felt the cool bite of handcuffs tethering his wrists to the bed's rails. The air was dry and antiseptic, chopped and churned by air conditioning. Twice a day, there was the mild sting of needles. He noticed it only as a way to tell the passing of time.

The world was faceless, but he came to recognise the three visitors by other means. The first was male, and sounded to be in his forties. He rarely spoke, and when he did, it was only ever of medical issues. _I'm going to give you an injection. Can you move this? Is there any feeling here?_ His hands were cool and dry in latex gloves, and he smelled faintly like wintergreen.

The second was female. She was slightly temperamental, quick-minded, and her voice rang with authority. He heard her coming by the sharp tattoo of her heels, and the barked orders in the corridors. She came close enough to stare directly into his eyes once, but all he could make out was a watercolour smudge of features surrounded by a pale, fiery halo of hair. When she spoke, she spoke both of medical issues, and people and places that he did not know. She did not touch him if she could help it, and all he felt was the warm blush of chakra seeping from her hands, always dry hospital air between them.

The third, the interrogator, was male. His gravelled voice sounded as though it was strained through old scars, and he could turn the world upside down with words. That voice could lead Itachi in circles for hours and hours, twisting and turning on itself like a snake in the hand. It would have battered at his defences, if he had any. Perhaps he might have broken, but there was nothing to give. Itachi knew nothing of demon foxes, of secret organisations and immortality ninjutsu.

The techniques were familiar, but they meant nothing. Threats were meaningless when he didn't know what he might have to lose, except this small, blind world. He knew of nobody he might care to protect. He had no loyalty to any organisation or country that he remembered. Sensory deprivation and isolation did not trouble him. Itachi let himself slip into a meaningless, memoryless world where days ran away like water between his fingers, and dimly wondered where he had learned to withstand interrogation.

* * *

Tsunade rested her head lightly on the piles of paperwork waiting to be approved, not caring if the ink would transfer to her face. She rubbed the corners of her aching eyes, and felt the slight paperiness in the skin that indicated she was too low on chakra to maintain her appearance. She had been reading almost non-stop for days, and when there were no answers, she had strayed into speculation instead. Too few had survived the Kyuubi to build sound theories on, and no matter how much chakra she poured in, it did nothing. Perhaps she was not enough of a medic nin to put aside her feelings.

There was a puff of smoke, and Tsunade lifted her head, startled, as Kakashi appeared and handed over a report she had personally requested. It was late by over two weeks. She would not question him, not this time. He met her eyes briefly, and there was an awkward moment when she thought she should say something, and then the words didn't come and the moment had gone, and it was too late.

"Have you decided what to do about- _that_- yet?" Kakashi jerked his head in the direction of the hospital.

Tsunade shook her head without answering. Her temples throbbed at the slight movement, her skull feeling like thin glass under pressure.

"Conscious yet?"

"Yes. He came round from the sedative with no problems."

"Not talking?"

"It's not that," Tsunade said, wearily. She looked aside. "The physical injuries were nothing too serious, and fortunately, he cannot seem to activate the Sharingan any more. The others-"

Kakashi tilted his head, waiting, while she tried to find the words.

"His mind is gone," Tsunade said, finally.

She saw the way Kakashi was surveying her. Even with the mask and headband, she could see the way his head tilted back to regard her speculatively, a fractional raise in his eyebrow.

"It's not a trick, Kakashi," she said, mildly irritated that he was questioning her capabilities.

Kakashi nodded, unperturbed. "How so?"

"No personal memories at all. Beyond that, I can't be sure. It's been a massive shock. No one knows for certain what an encounter with the Kyuubi can do."

There had been all kinds of patients last time the fox was sealed away. With each sweep of its tail, a massive wave of energy had crushed bones inside victims standing half a mile away. Some of those who got too close had simply burst into flame, flooded with too much raw chakra to withstand. Some had been driven hopelessly insane by that same, concentrated energy.

"Are his memories likely to return?"

Tsunade shrugged, helplessly. "It's too unpredictable." Even with simple head injuries, there was no way to tell the course that memory loss might take. They may be gone forever, or return in days. Sometimes after decades they could come back from one simple trigger; from a child's laughter ringing in clear autumn air, the scent of evergreen in winter, a long-lost photograph found fallen behind a drawer.

"Is he a danger?"

"Itachi will always be a danger, as you know," she said. "But he has no memories to give him any motive, and it's unlikely he would be able to control his chakra if he could remember anything he has learned. He cannot activate the Sharingan either, and his sight is almost gone without it."

"So you haven't decided what to do."

"No. There's the jail-"

Except she had already thought about this, and there were too many problems she did not need to point out to Kakashi. Their jail was not built to hold S-rank criminals, particularly those who could cast genjutsu at Itachi's level. If his mind returned, he could walk straight out of the place. And if it didn't, they were imprisoning a half-blind seventeen year old with no way of defending themselves, no knowledge of what they were being punished for.

It would be better if Akatsuki had taken him, if his partner hadn't been forced to retreat before the Kyuubi. Itachi would be dead now, perhaps, but at least they could let the criminals judge their own, and there would not be this dilemma.

Kakashi shrugged. "He'd be charged for crimes he effectively hasn't committed yet," he continued blandly. "On the other hand, his rights end where the village's rights to live safely begin."

"He can't stay in the hospital indefinitely," Tsunade said. "People will get complacent. Or someone will find out-" she paused. "It's not so much for his sake. What if someone attacks him, and he can't control it-"

It was the black flames that came to mind, that Jiraiya had reported. It had burned through the gullet of a creature that breathed fire, and it had burned on for days no matter what jutsu was used against it. That had been one controlled wave of it, not the maelstrom of flame that might arise if Itachi was threatened.

"And Sasuke. What would we say to Sasuke if he found out we were sheltering his brother?"

"It's unlikely we're going to take another Akatsuki alive," Kakashi reminded her. "Sasuke will hardly mistake it for an act of kindness. If it's for information-"

"_What_ information?" Tsunade asked, angrily. "He doesn't know who _he_ is, let alone the rest of Akatsuki."

"Isn't it rare for memory loss to be permanent?" Kakashi asked, almost conversationally.

"So keep him around- in a hospital full of _sick_ patients- and maybe no one will assassinate him, or he won't lose control and take the whole village with him. And then _maybe_ his memories will return, and _maybe_ he's not going to be clever enough to hide it and kill his way out of here as soon as there's an opportunity-" she stopped, her voice rising too high and erratic. "I'm sorry. It's too dangerous. No information is that important."

And even with his memories restored, it was doubtful they'd get anything from Itachi. S-class criminals did not give up their secrets so easily, and he was ex-ANBU. If Tsunade had faith that Kakashi would not break under interrogation, she had to extend that same faith to Itachi.

"Then you should see to him before his memories return," Kakashi said, blandly, as though they were merely discussing the arrangements for the next Chuunin exams.

"Yes," Tsunade agreed. "Except would we really be killing Itachi?"

"I'd do it," he said, with a slight shrug. It would not be the first time. ANBU could kill in cold blood. The village did not go in for public executions that made martyrs out of criminals. Captured, dangerous prisoners were killed without ceremony, out of sight and out of mind, buried in unmarked graves and forgotten. Their only memorial was erasure from the bingo books.

There was a long moment of silence. She regarded him without judgement, and he met her eyes, mildly. He looked no different to before. If this had happened a month ago, his answer would be the same. Tsunade did not know whether it would have troubled her more or _less_ if Kakashi had came back changed.

"Where are you going?" she asked sharply, as Kakashi turned and leapt lightly into the window frame. The hospital lay in that direction.

Kakashi raised an eyebrow. "To visit Sakura," he said, and was gone.

Sakura was sat upright when he arrived, back to the wall, her bed where she had asked they moved it so that she could see both the window and the door at once. Kakashi was unsurprised. He expected Sakura even slept upright now, and if the hospital didn't think her too unstable, she'd have a kunai in her hands, even in hands that were still too damaged to close around a knife handle.

The table beside the bed overflowed with flowers. Kakashi wondered if he had ever appreciated flowers before they became irrevokably associated with the dead and dying. He couldn't tell, since he had been familiar with death before he was old enough to have any memories at all.

There had been plenty of flowers piled on Obito's sad grave, a grave only half the size of an adults, barely even a scratch in the earth to show where he lay. The village had covered it with arrangements as though to spare their eyes the sight of that raw open scar, until it looked as though Obito's spilled blood had brought a thousand flowers blooming overnight.

Kakashi had brought cherry blossom to Obito's grave. Cherry blossom made no promises. They only ever bloomed for days, and then they melted like snow back into the ground. Their petals were said to be stained pink with blood they drank from graves.

There had been plenty of flowers for him too. "Kind of fruity," Kotetsu had said, sheepishly, appearing with Izumo and a flower arrangement they kept passing awkwardly between them, before Kotetsu had shoved it onto the table without ceremony. Iruka had brought flowers without any shame, yellow roses and daffodils for friendship. Kurenai and Asuma came together, bringing a simple arrangement with a branch of wild white flowers surrounded by pale forest grasses. Tsunade had brought lilies, lilies and scalpels and the slow burn of healing chakra.

Sakura would have had three times the amount of flowers he had received, even before he'd asked the nurse to cut the tags and take the lot to her room. She looked up as he arrived, small and lost among the flowers.

"You look better," she said, dully.

"You too," It was a lie. Her eyes were the muted green of stagnant water trapped too long, her skin paler than fallen cherry blossom fading back into the ground. The last of her bruises were still there, a faint muted yellow like the primroses one of her former classmates had brought.

She nodded, letting her limp hair wash over her face. Her fingers were still knotted clumsily together through splints and bandages.

"Naruto came back from his training," Kakashi said, perching on the windowsill.

Sakura looked up and then smiled. Too faint, but it was a genuine smile and not one that threatened to snap and pull apart into hysteria, and he decided to follow up on it.

"I know you can keep this to yourself," he said. "But we may have more information that could lead us to Akatsuki, and then Sasuke."

She nodded, slowly, but did not answer. Her fingers twisted, pulling bandages loose and tucking them back in awkwardly. Kakashi wondered if he should say something now- _sorry, I failed you_- but it would be a lie. He had done everything by the book. There would be no enquiry, no discipline. When he left the hospital, the other jounin had nodded at him, silently acknowledging that he had done his job. He had nothing to apologise for. This was the life they had both signed up for. She was thirteen years old. He had been her age when he had lost a best friend and an eye.

"I'll tell Naruto you're in here," he said, standing to leave. "I'll let him know- about-"

"Thank you," she said, and gave him that weak smile again, and he knew she would be okay. Maybe not now, or next week, or even in a year, but she'd be back training in a month, out on missions in three, and one day, this would all be lost under more painful memories until there was too much scarring to feel it any more.

"I really didn't say anything," she said, absently, not really talking to him at all.

"I'm sorry, Sakura," he said, pausing at the door. "That shouldn't happen to a medic nin."


	3. Chapter 3

Felix Culpa

Author's Notes- Another two chapters at once, since I find this one kind of dull- unfortunately, I can't really skip it or jump into the main story too quickly. That mostly begins to take off towards the end of the next chapter. Oh, and the parts in italics are flashbacks, but that should usually be obvious.

Thank you so much for reviews or adding this fic to favourites/alerts! I really enjoy writing this and would like to see it finished soon, so it's encouraging to know people are following it.

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No copyright infringement is intended and no profit is being made.

- - -

It was past midnight.

Ninja villages never slept. A few drunks weaved through the streets, propping each other up and singing snatches of song, or vomiting noisily into the gutter. In the skies, the scatterdust of stars was occasionally broken by a lithe black silhouette leaping between rooftops, as silent as a leaf caught in the wind. Ninja were never off duty. Kakashi watched out for every middle-aged woman putting her cat out, every elderly man drinking before his window, every slim teenage girl slipping from a bedroom window to meet a boy under the impassive stone-gaze of the carved Hokage.

Hospitals never slept either. Most of the windows were black and blind, but there would be a thin trickle of night staff moving through the hospital's veins at all times. Kakashi walked in quite openly, nodded to the security guard, and silently dropped the man with a single pressure point as he passed. The guard's eyes rolled back as he crumpled soundlessly into the shadows. He was unharmed. Cold dawn light would find him only aching and bewildered and shamed.

The receptionist never saw him coming. Her back was turned, filing something under her desk. Kakashi took a moment to move her into the back room and lay her out comfortably on a small couch. One of the ANBU members moving ghost-like behind him stood by the desk instead, his fixed porcelain mask a sharp contrast to the receptionist's tired, pretty smile and neat uniform.

Kakashi made his way through the hospital, nodding at the two doctors he encountered. Neither of them questioned who he was, or why he was here. He was more than familiar with hospitals, both as a patient and an escort. An ANBU member was waiting at the end of the corridor. He couldn't tell if it was the same guard as before.

Into the room, and Kakashi let the door shut silently behind him. With the windows shuttered, the darkness was complete. It was the sort of darkness that seemed to clot in the air, so thick it rolled in the lungs like velvet made mist, so tangible it was better to shut your eyes than to feel it pressing softly inwards.

He had spent so much time lightless that it was almost like coming home. He let it wash over him, letting his other senses slowly spread outwards and filter information from the darkness congealing around him. He breathed in antiseptic and the clean scent of cotton boiled thin from too many washes. The distant mild beep of machines, heels clicking on tiles and far-away coughs came spreading up into his bones through the walls and floors they had soaked into. Closer still, he could almost feel Itachi's presence, although the Uchiha had kept his breathing as deliberately slow and deep as a man half-comatose.

Kakashi flipped the switch, and even underneath the bandaged eyes, saw Itachi's skin pull suddenly taut at the blazing light. They must have found out very early into the interrogation that Itachi could not tolerate bright lights at all.

"Move," he said blandly, yanking the sheet away. Itachi wore plain, loose-fitting hospital clothes. It would do. They would not be moving outside, not where anyone could see them.

He threw the sheet over Itachi's head anyway. "Leave it there."

Itachi came quietly- far too quietly. No questions, no confusion, none of the _fear_ he would expect from a patient taken from their bed in the middle of the night. Kakashi believed Tsunade was correct when she said his memories had gone. But there was a difference between memories and the instincts that had become ingrained over those years, the unconscious way people learned without even knowing it. You could cut away every personal memory, and never find the person that Itachi might once have been, in another world.

Through the hospital corridors, empty save for a handful of ANBU members standing as silent and motionless as ghosts, and into a maintenance tunnel opening from the basement floor. It was drier than Kakashi had expected, and only slightly cooler than the world above. There was a thin, waspish sound as dim lights buzzed into life along its length, their cases filled with papery drifts of insects. The walls were cracked and stained with delicate patterns of damp like frozen leaves and fly wings. A few workmen had left their names or chalked doodles that already looked like cave-paintings from another era. The floor was wide, smooth concrete, few obstacles for Itachi to stumble over save the occasional tool left behind, or a mug with the contents long dried to gummy residue.

They moved in silence with one escort before and another following, and Itachi had still not asked whether they were going to another holding place or an execution. The minutes slipped away as they passed underneath a thousand sleeping ninja, with only the occasional drip or the faint echo of footsteps to break the silence.

The entrance to the tunnel emerged outside the village, usually sealed with heavy doors and tags, and concealed under a thick layer of turf. It was almost a surprise to emerge into thin starlight and find that less than an hour had slipped away in the tunnels beneath Konoha.

The two ANBU guards melted away silently, with no announcement, disappearing back into the night like salt stirred into water. They carried on alone. The forest was well-cared for here. The Nara clan cleared away any fallen trees, while the grazing deer kept the undergrowth down, and there were few holes or fallen branches for Itachi to stumble over.

They had been provided with a house far enough from the village to keep Itachi's presence a secret. Built by one of the Nara clan perhaps, for someone staying out here to maintain the forests. It almost seemed to grow out of the forest floor itself, a small, shabby cabin made from silvered wood. It was well-constructed but austere, perhaps never meant to be a home, but a base in which someone might be posted for a season or so.

Kakashi unlocked the door. The hinges squealed from disuse as it swung open onto a dusty corridor. Someone had been before them and left a few boxes there.

Itachi followed him into the main room, not stumbling on the steps although Kakashi heard the papery whisper of his hand gliding over the rail, the door frame, the walls. Someone had cleaned the house recently, but it was still obvious that it had long stood empty. The air smelled dusty and dry like attics and long-forgotten places. The furniture was plain and battered, the wood scarred and the fabric worn thin and shiny, probably brought here after being replaced in some family home long ago.

"You're staying here for now."

"I'm not from around here."

"No," Kakashi agreed, or at least the slash through the forehead protector had cut away whatever bonds Itachi could have once claimed.

Itachi did not have any more questions, about his own identity or why they had been taken to what must clearly be some kind of safehouse. The silence lay thicker than dust.

Kakashi crossed over to the window and leaned on the sill, staring into the night. By moonlight, everything was as grey as the softly crumbling wood beneath his palms. Some nocturnal bird fluttered across the skies, as black and ragged as charred paper floating from a fire. Something low and sleek bounded from shadow to shadow, freezing whenever it found cover. There was a distant chittering, a rustle, something crying as lost and lonely as a child.

Itachi was still standing in the room, not awkwardly for a blind man marooned in unfamiliar surroundings. The moonlight spilled into the room, weak as diluted milk. If Itachi had any colour to steal, it would have bleached him monochrome.

"You should get some sleep," Kakashi said, still listening to the small sounds of things hunting and dying.

Itachi didn't acknowledge him, but silently left, retracing the way they had came in. At each step, the stairs made a small, arthritic sound that creaked throughout the house's skeleton and let Kakashi track Itachi like a fly in a web as he moved upstairs. He did not hesitate or stumble, but there was something too slow and cautious about his footsteps, pausing before taking each step into blindspace.

Kakashi stayed by the window for a while, breathing cool forest air that seeped in around the glass. The floorboards had ceased to creak, placing Itachi somewhere on the first floor, to the left of the house. Kakashi had learned to trust his instincts no matter how irrational they may seem, and now, he did not sense any immediate threat. Neither was it time to relax. Even without his memories, Itachi was still Itachi Uchiha.

He had not been naïve enough to expect a complete innocent, mind wiped clean, a tabula rasa waiting to be rewritten. Kakashi had seen Itachi when he was a member of ANBU, and known that the Uchiha was going deeply, inevitably wrong. He would not go so far as to say he had forseen the massacre. Even Itachi's own clan, full of doubt and suspicion, could not have seen this. The lifestyle drove so many into depression or insanity that it was impossible to see which would end up like Itachi, like trying to predict where a meteor might land tomorrow.

Most of them quietly imploded, and started drinking heavily and pulling away from everything that had anchored them to the world. They started getting a little too silent, a little too morose, starting a fight in a bar over nothing, returning from missions a little too bloodstained. Interests they had once cared about were forgotten. Friends were driven away one by one, and relationships severed in violence and unforgivable words. Until one day, a superior would suggest that maybe it was time they took a break, a gentle way of telling them to leave. And then they'd either recover just a little, enough to keep sending them back out until they reached retirement age, or they got themselves killed in action, and that was the end of things.

Kakashi dozed on the couch, a thin unsatisfying sleep skimming just below the surface of consciousness.

_The sky was angry, endlessly shredded apart by a distant wind that drove the red clouds ceaselessly from horizon to horizon. He watched the ragged clouds stream past in seconds, and thought perhaps entire days were ticking over in minutes. But that couldn't be it, because the moon was always still, an angry open sore in the middle of those storm-torn skies._

_The crucifixes looked sketched against the shifting skies, as flat and lifeless as a child's chalk drawings, as insubstantial as bundles of tinder-dry sticks. He died, endlessly, underneath the red moon. It watched him lidlessly, a raw inflamed eye that spilled light like dilute blood over these bleak lands. Before the pain stole his last coherent thought, Kakashi stared out at the flat horizon, and wondered if he could walk out there forever and keep working deeper into the whorls of Itachi's mind without anything ever changing at all._

_Three days. Kakashi didn't think anyone could take this in real life._

_He was wrong._

At around 4:30am, Kakashi woke to a morning the colour of used dishwater, and went upstairs.


	4. Chapter 4

Felix Culpa

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended. One small quote is modified from Goteki's Ninjagrrl.

- - -

Itachi explored the house early the next morning. He thought the ninja was awake and listening, but for some reason, he didn't make his presence known.

He could not see the pale, dusty bloom of morning light filtered twice through the canopy and unwashed windows, but he placed the time by the thin sounds around him. The walls creaked and popped with gunshot sound as the aged wood began to expand, stretching out like a flower to the rising sun. Weak fluttering birdsong rose and fell hesitantly on the still air.

Whoever he was, it was in his nature to know his surroundings. He traced the walls, and learned where the door frames where so that he could walk through them without catching a shoulder. There was a low table near the front door that he would have to avoid. A floorboard squeaked three feet from the kitchen, a warning before the two steps leading down into the next room. The living room was almost obstacle-free, save for one low coffee table and a spindly wooden chair in the corner. The rest of the furniture was all solid chairs that he could not easily fall over.

Itachi skimmed his hands over the surface and felt the almost silken texture of dust curling away in plumes at his touch. The ninja did not strike him as a man who would tolerate mess in his home. Someone else's house, then. The air smelled like more dust, dust and dry wood and furniture polish. Perhaps no one's home at all.

He had woken up early that morning, as he had done every day since he could remember. It was the pain behind his eyes that awoke him, as though it kindled in sunlight and burned down to coals in darkness. Itachi had been given painkillers in hospital. They quietened other surfaces aches and pains, but they could not numb this. By night, it was a dry-socket ache throbbing down to inflamed bone. In the light, it flared up as though someone had carved out the spaces behind his eyes and filled them with slices of raw white sunfire.

_Who are you?_

It had been three hours since he had awoken before that question was finally asked. It was the woman who had asked him, the woman with healing in her hands and steel in her voice. The others had moved aside when she had stood. She came close enough to stare into his eyes as though she might find some answers there. He could not see anything except light and shadows and the dim fiery glow of her hair. The faint smell of old sake overlaid the clean, ozone-smell of healing chakra that surrounded her. Her hand had closed over his arm, steel cables wrapped in soft female skin, and there had been the slow itch from broken blood vessels blossoming there the next day. Itachi did not doubt she could have crushed his wrist if she wanted to, and thought of carnivorous tropical flowers closing shut with a snap.

Itachi could not answer her question. His memories were all recent. His dreams gave nothing away. He accumulated knowledge piece by piece, storing it away. He was in a hospital, therefore something must have happened to bring him there. He had been interrogated, therefore he was presumably a criminal or a missing nin. Their questions were careful, never giving names, never revealing more information than they acquired. An organisation, asked about and never named. The location of an unnamed member, long defected. _What are your aims?_

Itachi only lived in the moment. He could have no aims, when there was no tomorrow.

* * *

Kakashi listened to Itachi moving around downstairs. The sounds of his hands tracing the walls were as distant as fly wings whispering together. Itachi moved from the stairs, the kitchen and hallway. He found the front door, and did not leave. There was nothing for him here, but perhaps even less outside. 

When Kakashi finally came downstairs, Itachi was in the living room, silent and staring into nothing at all, and Kakashi again thought of porcelain animal masks frozen into a quiet, forever calm. Itachi had the same stillness around him that he had at thirteen, the stillness of deep waters overlaying treacherous currents. When people heard about the Uchiha massacre, they expected something half-berserk, a living weapon for Akatsuki to keep sealed away and unleash as needed. Kakashi had known Itachi better. If he had some seething madness, it was so deeply hidden it had crystallised long ago. He was winter snow on outside, if he was firestorm within.

Itachi was idly re-wrapping the bandages around his hand, and Kakashi's recently healed bones throbbed at their own memories. He had lost count of how many bones he had broken over the years and never felt the spaces where they had knitted back together stronger than before. These still felt strange where they had regrown, strange and splintery as though the crushed shards were still trapped in jellied flesh.

_ANBU had trained him to withstand any interrogation, either physical or mental. He slowed his breathing, relaxed his mind, tried to reduce the pain back to a simple pattern of electrochemical activity. Sensation was nothing but a particular interpretation of those signals. He tried to rewrite them, to find familiar patterns. A tickle from long hair sweeping electric over his bare arm. Warm summer rain snaking like liquid lace down his spine. Lips fluttering over heated skin. Pakkun's fur, dry and springy underneath his hand._

_The hallucinations began on the fifth day. He let the darkness in, kept breathing it in until it was a part of him and the solitude was familiar. They killed a prisoner in front of him. He imagined the young man's life and breath between his fingers, and mentally snuffed it out, thought of him as already dead and it was nothing to Kakashi._

_Metal squealed, stringing symphonies from raw bone. Kakashi could have gone away, but he stayed grimly in there as long as he could. Standard ANBU training. A careless interrogator could reveal more information than they received._

_When they brought in Sakura, it was time for him to leave. It was like a scene in any book or movie. "Don't tell them anything!" she had screamed, like the heroine always did, and he had nodded slightly in acknowledgement. If this was a book though, the hero would not have been able to watch her suffer. He would have either given them the information and escaped to stop them before they did anything, or lied and caught them in some clever trap._

_Instead, Kakashi began to dissociate himself from the room. It was very easy, like a wounded animal dragging itself from a trap, pulling himself from mangled flesh to somewhere none of this could touch him._

_Perhaps he had done it too well. _

He blinked, and came back to the living room, smoothly and easily. "Do you need painkillers?"

"No."

"Fine," he turned to go into the kitchen, and paused. "Don't go too far into the woods. There are traps."

The Nara clan knew that this house was being used for some purpose, and that the area around it had been sealed to prevent anyone from mistakenly blundering in. They had not asked any questions. They were not inquisitive, and could keep to themselves when they wanted.

Itachi was gone when Kakashi came back into the room. He hadn't heard him leave. Some residual memories perhaps, memories that were laid down in bone and muscle that remembered how to move, how to kill, even after the mind was gone.

* * *

Itachi had already traced most of the bathroom earlier, and the layout was clear in his mind. No longer in images, but he knew where to turn and how many steps to take to move from one part to another. The cupboard above the sink was almost empty and thick with dust. Someone had left the basics there- bandages, a fat tube of some ointment or another, a small glass bottle that might be eyedrops, a bigger bottle tacky with some kind of syrup. One flat box containing two blister packs of pills. 

His eyesight was too gone to make out the print, but the bitter taste was of generic painkillers. Itachi dry-swallowed two, not expecting anything.

The voice came again when he was standing by the sink, low and calm and unmoved, as though it did not expect to be overheard.

_The link is destroyed-_

A sudden sharp pain blossomed behind Itachi's eyes, like red flowers unfurling, like red fireworks exploding in black skies, like a mist of red pollen as a puffball split open into raw meat and broken glass. His vision fractured into a thousand shards falling apart around him, jaw locking up tight enough to taste blood. It split through his mind in one second, tore everything up in its wake and resonated down to the bone. One short squall of it, like static between radio stations, and then it was gone.

The world swung giddily around for a moment before it steadied, and his torn mind began to gather back in on itself, knitting back together one coherent thought at a time. This was not the first time. The voice had came once before while he was at hospital, a short snatch of a sentence that had made no sense and split through his mind like a drill. He had told no one.

Itachi did not need to hold on to the bannister when he came back down the stairs. The layout was already memorised.

Civilians did not automatically map their surroundings in this way. Itachi had already realised he was not a civilian. They were not interrogated, or kept under the supervision of someone like this. His mind skipped through simple, factual knowledge, things he knew without any memory. _Missing nin, _perhaps. It was not impossible. It had not been too cool outside, even though the air had smelled like crackling autumn leaves. There had been little rain he had heard while in the hospital. The dialects were all Fire Country, and the ninja around him would be from Konoha. If he were from another village, he should have been handed over to their hunters.

He was from Konoha, or at least, he was known to them enough that they had not handed him over to his own country. It was still speculation, nothing more.

"Do you know who I am?"

"Yes," the ninja did not sound surprised by the question. His voice was unmoved. He was flicking through something, a book or report, and Itachi did not feel his vision lift from the pages. His own sight would be useless here. This man would give nothing away in his expressions. This was a mission, and nothing more to him.

"An order."

"Yes."

Itachi took a seat. He had not expected any answers.

"I came from the village," A careful opening gambit, throwing some of his own acquired knowledge out to see what he might receive in return. "Someone would know me."

"Your clan are long dead," the ninja replied. Itachi added it to the list of things he had learned. He felt nothing in particular. He had woken without a family, and he would only know them by a list of names, an anecdote here or there. There may be a cousin who might have been a best friend, a younger brother or sister who trailed around after him with a rubber training kunai and toy shuriken. A father who may have boasted about him after too many drinks, perhaps a mother who had bandaged first scraped knees, and then knife wounds when he had limped home after a mission.

"You don't want to know who killed them?" the ninja asked, not sounding curious.

"I don't remember any of them," Itachi replied, calmly, and resumed staring into the black aching spaces behind his eyes. He could not mourn the people he did not remember.

* * *

Kakashi went out into the woods alone. If he needed to, he could easily catch up with a blind ninja. But there was no reason why Itachi would leave. He simply had nowhere else to go. 

There was nothing for Kakashi to do, save watch for the signs of Itachi's returning memory. The order did not trouble him. He would not have chosen to keep Itachi alive, but that was irrelevant. The order had been given. He would stay here until his leave was over.

Kakashi methodically flung kunai at a tree, one by one. His aim was as sure as ever. The last few weeks had not dulled him at all, not even if the pain was still there. Tsunade had said he could return to light training now, and that it shouldn't bother him. He had not gone to see her again. Her healing chakra and medicines could only sink in so far.

_Three. Four_. He lined them up neatly alongside each other, for want of any better target. The tree was young and slim, and four kunai left a wound right across its trunk, stitched up in metal. He began a new row underneath.

_Seven. Eight_. The rhythmic thud of metal in wood was more familiar to him than another's heartbeat. It was the sound he heard in the blood in his temples at night.

At twelve, he had run out of kunai. He yanked them free one by one, and watched the tree bleed clear sap to fill the empty spaces he had laid open.

It was already dying. He summoned up spitting white fire in his hand, filling the air with the chirrup of a thousand frenzied birds fluttering in his palm. He held it for a moment, feeling the chakra lines along his arm flaring up with pain, before he buried it deep in the wounded wood, cauterising it in lightning.

Then the tree fell with an arthritic groan, splitting open to clean, white splintery wood at the place it had broke. He let the chakra fade away, his skin tingling not unpleasantly. The air smelled like charged ozone, like the clean air left behind after a storm.

Inexplicably, it was that boy he remembered, the boy whose name he had already forgotten. He had worn the mask of a hunter nin, and Kakashi had filled his heart with crackling white fire. He regretted the boy's death, but he did not feel guilt. There was no use dwelling on the worlds that might have arose from one different action.

_Some villages had suicide pills, Kakashi had heard. They hollowed out a tooth so that one hard bite could break the glass and release the poison. No need to risk information slipping under torture, to send their ninja to a slow and agonising death. There must be a kind of comfort in lying in wait on a mission, running a tongue over the smooth bubble of glass, and knowing there was always a way out._

_Kakashi bit down, imagining the thin crack of glass between his teeth, the sugar scrunch as it ground to dust and he breathed in ice so pure it froze his lungs instantly, like early spring flowers caught in frost._

_He wanted to taste bitter almond, but his mouth was too full of blood._

It was night when Kakashi slowly went back to the house. There was nothing for him there either. The deer walked a little way with him, stepping delicately through the crackling leaves. In the darkness, they were all silver. They watched him with dark eyes that seemed impossibly wise, yet they had not learned to fear human company.

It was too difficult to sleep upstairs. The cotton sheets grated against his skin like a handful of scrubbed sand. The starlight filtered through the curtains burned a thousand jabbing pinpricks into his eyelids. The soft, comfortable sounds of the house settling around him snapped and cracked like wood in a bonfire.

He went back downstairs.

The cellar was cool, and smelled like packed earth and rusty water. Once the door was shut, it closed in on itself like an abscess under the house. He let the door close silently behind him, and the familiar darkness rushed forward, pressing itself into his eyes as he sat down among the forgotten things and the small sounds of insects that neither noticed or cared about his presence.


	5. Chapter 5

Felix Culpa

Author's Notes – Thank you all _so much_ for reviewing. The hits-to-review ratio on this is very high, which means a lot more to me than simply getting a high number of reviews. I began replying, but got a little confused, so sorry if you received no/several replies! But they're all so appreciated- I do a gleeful little dance every time I get one.

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

- - -

Another night passed.

Itachi's dreams were vague and lacked any emotion. Without memories, they consisted of simple sounds and sensations from the last few days, strung together in no particular order. He played them through once more upon waking, found nothing of interest hidden there, and let them slip from his memory. If whoever he had once been was still caught up in the splintery remains of his subconscious, it did not show. Itachi's dreams were never anything more than the product of a mind with nothing else to do, a random firing of neurons interpreted in the simplest way.

It wasn't until the second night when something new appeared in his dreams.

He could see, in this dream, and sight was not unfamiliar to him either. It was too dark to make out much besides the razorbacked, animalistic outline of something rising up over the horizon, cutting apart his red skies with too many lashing tails. It spoke with a voice that was human once, now strained through so many teeth that the words were caught up, and all that filtered through was murder. Even this far away, the hot, feral jungle air crackled and snapped with raw energy, and the ground shuddered and rolled with every step it took as though it was made of thunder trapped in animal form. It snapped at the air, at the swarming humans it brushed away as easily as fleas.

Kakashi didn't dream that night. He wasn't surprised. Some nights he didn't dream at all.

He was awake before dawn, just as the skies were washed with a light as weak as spilled paint water. He had slept perhaps two hours that night, and less the night before. It was irrelevant. He could go for weeks like this. It was cold, and his joints had locked down like rusted machinery frozen shut. That, too, was irrelevant. Kakashi had undergone missions for months at end in frozen, sleeping lands. It was dark in the kitchen, but there was nothing to see anyway. He watched the deer stepping delicately around through the scattered junk and overgrown weeds around the house, so lightly their fragile legs did not seem to even brush the dew from the grass.

The second night was gone.

_You have two months_.

When Kakashi finally moved to the living room, he was holding a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago. Itachi was already there. Kakashi did not bother turning the lights on. Itachi was blind, and there was nothing he hadn't seen before anyway.

Someone approached the house not long after dawn. Kakashi was not concerned. Whoever it was, they had lifted the seals around the house, and had come from the village with Tsunade's knowledge. He had expected there would be the occasional ANBU member watching silently from the trees, and perhaps someone openly calling by in a week or so to see if they needed anything. He would tolerate their company, but he did not particularly want to see anyone. At least Itachi's presence was so flat he often seemed to be only sketched onto the air.

Still, if someone had been sent so early, it was likely that Tsunade had forgotten something, or that the situation had changed. Kakashi waited by the door to see who she had thought it necessary to send, and wondered if they were to check on Itachi, or himself.

Kakashi heard Naruto come blundering through the woods long before he appeared. He wasn't as surprised as he should be. Sending an unqualified genin out here was foolish, but Tsunade always had a blind spot where Naruto and his determination to save Sasuke were involved. He wondered how long it would take her to finally declare Sasuke a missing-nin, and stop letting everyone pretend he was being held against his free will. Sasuke had made his choices, and every day passing was a day by Orochimaru's side, getting so deep into forbidden arts that he would lose himself before long.

Perhaps Tsunade hoped that Naruto would slowly come to the same conclusion by himself over these next three years, with no need to break it to him. If so, she was wrong. Naruto would never stop believing that Sasuke could be saved. Kakashi didn't know if he had Naruto's faith. He had thought Sasuke was essentially a good kid, but sometimes this happened to the best of them. He'd had his chances. If Sakura and Naruto and Kakashi were not enough to tether him to the village, then maybe no one event could have undone what Itachi had laid down in one hour of blood and black flame.

_Near the waterfall, and Naruto landed hard with all the life and grace suddenly smashed from him, and Sasuke was approaching hesitantly. Kakashi froze where he was. He should be there, taking the knife from Sasuke, and he knew that Sasuke would let him. But they were so far away, and perhaps he'd only make Sasuke strike out of nerves, and perhaps Kakashi simply wouldn't let himself believe that one of his students would really do this._

_Sasuke was paused, on the edge of a new world, knife wavering like a grass blade in his hands. The day was suddenly very bright, and everything seemed hushed, waiting for this one moment. Naruto stirred slightly, the smallest movement imaginable, and from the way Sasuke froze, Kakashi could tell he was talking. He watched as Sasuke went down on his knees, but the knife was already lowered, and he couldn't tell what words they exchanged. Minutes passed_

_And then the knife was winging through the air, striking sparks from a rock before it disappeared into the foam. Sasuke was gone after it, bounding up the cliff as though his injuries were nothing to him._

_As soon as Sasuke had turned away, Kakashi was running towards Naruto. The water whickered underneath him as he ran, a fine mist from the waterfall dampening the air. It was pleasant, too pleasant for what must have passed here. He could see the wounds they had gouged into the rock, the blackened patches where the light air had been filled with fire. Blood had ran into the river in thin thready plumes, but there was too much water to stain it pink._

_And then Kakashi realised that Uzumaki Naruto was dead._

_His chest was still, his pulse gone, and yet he still looked too vital and alive. Still warm, flushed from the exertion, nothing but a trickle of blood and some bruising to mar his face. His expression was only slightly pained, the same grimace he wore when something displeased him. _

_He laid Naruto back down, very gently. There was nothing else Kakashi could do for this student now._

_He knew Sasuke hadn't gone far, and he was right. Sasuke's seal had activated itself, and for a moment, all he could see was the misshapen wings. He looked like some insect smashed from the air, something graceful and aerodynamic seconds before, now broken and out of its depth._

_After a few seconds, the seal began to fade, and that was when Kakashi revealed himself._

_Sasuke didn't look up. He was shaking, one knee propped up before him, staring at the ground. It could have so easily gone another way. Perhaps Sasuke was a little quicker at a crucial time, or maybe just luckier. It could have been either, both, none of them at all, and perhaps if Kakashi had seen the signs earlier or got there a little faster, he'd be carrying home an unconscious Sasuke, Naruto jubilantly bounding along beside him. _

_At that moment, Kakashi knew that if he activated Chidori, Sasuke would not do anything to defend himself._

"_How does it feel?" he asked, that first murder, and he wondered if Itachi had ever been like this. He remembered the rumours. They had all suspected he had killed his own best friend, and it had been unofficially taken as fact after the massacre. Or maybe it wasn't, and Shisui had been one of the last things anchoring Itachi to the village. Maybe the suspicion had driven him further from the clan. Kakashi supposed no one would ever know._

"_He said he hoped it would help me find peace," Sasuke's voice was muted and dazed and far away, half talking to himself, and Kakashi knew this would go no further. One thing different- some vital connection that Itachi had not made- and this was not the first of many deaths. _

_Sasuke finally looked up, shaking, and Kakashi saw something involuntarily sliding across his vision, the sign of the full Mangekyou Sharingan. _

Naruto came clattering noisily up the steps, a full pouch of shuriken and knives swinging at his side. Kakashi wasn't surprised that Tsunade had let him come. He was, however, surprised to see that Iruka had come as Naruto's escort. There were a few ANBU members who knew that Itachi was being held here, and would make a far better guard without the need to let anyone else know about his presence. Iruka was a chuunin, a school teacher, and one with a blind spot as large as Tsunade's where the well-being of his students was concerned.

"Out," Kakashi said before Naruto opened his mouth, steering his former student back outside and into the woods. The leaves had just began to fall, a thin red and bronze crust lying over the grass like slices of gold leaf, and the deer fled at their sudden noisy intrusion.

Naruto protested mildly. "Why are you leaving him alone, sensei?" His eyes were narrowed with suspicion as he turned to look back at the house through the trees, his hand moving instinctively to the kunai at his side.

"The area is sealed," Kakashi told him. "He won't leave."

"Is old lady Tsunade right?" Naruto asked, still suspicious. Iruka crunched through the leaves after them, hands in pockets, staring at the papery drifts. He still hadn't said anything.

"Yes," Kakashi said, and cut in before Naruto opened his mouth. "And no, he doesn't know anything about Orochimaru's location. I'll be ready if his memories come back."

Naruto closed his mouth, looked as though he still had plenty to say on the subject, and then his expression changed. "Is Sakura going to be okay?"

"Eventually," Kakashi said, not softening it too much.

Iruka hesitated, then glanced up and finally spoke. "You?"

"I always am, aren't I?" Kakashi said, and turned back towards the house.

It looked very dark among the brilliant leaves. The curtains still needed to be opened. The walls were covered with some straggling vines that needed tearing down before the roots worked too deep into the wood and split it apart. The gutters were choked with debris, and would overflow as soon as the autumn leaves began to fall thick. The roof needed fixing, and he could see the spidery, smashed dragonfly shapes of two cracked windows. None of it really seemed very important.

They went through the front door, rather than heading straight to the clearing behind the house. Itachi had not moved in their absence.

"Hey," Naruto said, a little uncertainly, his eyes still watchful. Itachi glanced at the space where Naruto would be, but did not acknowledge him.

"I'll join you in a minute," Iruka said. Kakashi shrugged, and went outside to see what news Naruto had brought. If Iruka wanted to stay here and torment himself with the memories of his students, it was his own business.

* * *

The living room was dark. Kakashi had shut all the curtains in the house during the first day, and had not opened them again since. It made no difference to Itachi either way. He knew that the quieter and older of the two newcomers remained there, and felt the man's uneasy eyes crawling across him, jumping from feature to feature as though trying to put together the pieces of some puzzle smashed beyond repair.

Minutes passed. The man cleared his throat once or twice, but didn't say anything, the words lost and dying before they were spoken.

"Want to go outside?" he eventually asked. Itachi did not answer, but followed after a moment.

He had not left the house since they had arrived, or explored the area around it. The sunlight hit him hard as the back door opened, and the slow burn behind his eyes began to prickle with dim heat. The air was warm and scented with dried leaves, a sweetly nostalgic smell that reminded him of fragrant teas, attics and old books.

As the door shut behind them, Itachi paused, uncertain of the surroundings. The change in the quiet man's footsteps indicated there were three steps downward. He reached into empty space, brushed a rail with the tips of his fingers and followed slowly, only stumbling on the last one. He felt the teacher reach out automatically, and stop just in time, moving away awkwardly towards the other two.

The boy's laughter faltered very slightly as Itachi emerged, and then picked up again.

"Hey sensei! Look what Jiraiya showed me-!"

There was a crackling sound that Itachi recognised as chakra rolling and gathering on itself, nothing like the soft oceanic sounds of healing chakra seeping into the air. Knives whistled through the air, chimed together musically without any malice. Their voices began to retreat further away, Iruka moving with them. Itachi heard the hiss of something arching high in the air from the mock-battle, and thudding into the ground nearby.

They sounded far away. He knelt, and pulled the knife out awkwardly, holding it as a civilian might. Then, without thought, it was playing over his hand as though spinning a pen. Thumb facing forward, in the standard combat position. From here it could easily shift into throwing position, and then into overhand for downward stabbing. He let it fall back by his side without further acknowledgement, before anyone came back this way.

"Remember anything yet?" Kakashi's voice came from nearby.

"No."

"I hear physical memories are stored differently to personal memories," Kakashi said, conversationally. "I knew a ninja in the village. Got hit over the head on a mission, remembers everything about the last fifteen years spent training, but he can't pick up a knife without cutting himself."

Kakashi began to walk away to join his fighting clone, then turned, and flicked a shuriken from his fingertips, almost lazily.

The air spattered red as Itachi moved, far too late, and it cut a thin line along his arm.

* * *

There was no privacy in a house this small. The voices from downstairs filtered up through the ill-fitting floorboards, carried on drafts several degrees cooler than the drowsy, golden autumn air outside. The newcomer's voice wasn't raised much higher than usual, but it had an edge in it like silk snagging on a nail. He was as unsettled as he was angry, and Itachi thought this might only be a trigger for something happened long ago.

"You idiot, Kakashi!"

"It's just a scratch. He won't die," Kakashi's voice, lazy and unperturbed.

"He's _blind_, how did you expect him to dodge a shuriken? Why would you even-"

"He could have avoided it, if he wanted to."

"What's going on?" the back door opened and there was the boy's voice, raised in alarm.

"Nothing. Go outside, Naruto."

There were protests, and then the outside door slamming angrily and footsteps echoing down the steps like gunshots through the weathered wood. A moment of stiff, angry silence from the teacher, waiting for Naruto to move away, and the voices began again.

"Until his memories come back, he's just-" the rest was too low to catch.

"He isn't Sasuke, Iruka," Kakashi said, his voice now a little sharp. It was the first time Itachi had heard an edge in it since they had arrived. "It's too late-"

The next part was too low to hear, and then Kakashi spoke up again. "-although, you always paid more attention to Naruto."

There was a long pause. Itachi could almost hear the sharp intake of breath in that silence, and suspected something unforgivable had been said. He wondered, vaguely, who Sasuke was. He had already worked out that Naruto was the boy outside, and from the way he addressed him, the quiet man was his teacher. Another student then, perhaps.

The voices were lowered now, all the anger knocked out of the quiet man, but it didn't feel as though the argument was over. Itachi had lost interest anyway. The boy was spying on him, through the window. He turned to face it, guessing where it was by the warmth of sunlight on his face, staring with blind eyes that might be milky and sightless for all he knew. He heard a tiny scuffle that might be nothing more than a bird taking flight, then a far-away thump as the boy landed back on the ground, trying to overhear the conversation in the kitchen.

More foosteps came up the stairs, too loud to be Kakashi.

"Are you alright?"

Anger seemed to have driven away the earlier hesitance that the quiet man had shown. Itachi didn't bother moving away as the man rummaged through the medicine cupboard, swiped something antiseptic over the small cut, and wrapped it in bandages with a quick, professional manner, as though used to bandaging small wounds all day. After an awkward moment or so, something waiting to be spoken hanging between them, the teacher turned uncertainly, and left. Itachi heard the footsteps go back downstairs, through the kitchen without talking to Kakashi, and then his voice calling out to Naruto, and they were gone.

Itachi carried on staring out through the window he couldn't see. The blood was already cooling and turning tacky beneath the bandages. It was unnecessary. The wound was not particularly deep, or long, or anywhere that it would trouble him when he moved. The pain from the cut was nothing.

He had _felt_ the shuriken coming. His sight was almost entirely gone, but he had heard the thin whistle, almost felt the sliced apart air, and he had not avoided it. It was almost too natural, to snatch up the dropped kunai and spin around to block it. It wouldn't require any more conscious thought than brushing away an insect.

Civilians could not block a weapon like that. Kakashi did not strike him as a man who would throw a weapon at someone they did not think could defend themselves.

So Kakashi suspected something.

Itachi touched the bandage, questioningly. It had been better to feign clumsiness and let it hit, and he still didn't know what had stopped him from revealing any more to Kakashi.

There was too much light in the bathroom. Midday autumn sun, stained gold by the leaves it filtered through, pouring in through his empty eyes and catching his scattered thoughts like kindling as he tried to hold on to them. There were patterns waiting to be found, but whenever he began to catch one, it broke up in a small dazzle of pain and was gone like a snuffed out candle flame.

He swallowed two painkillers, and went back downstairs.


	6. Chapter 6

Felix Culpa

Author's Notes- Another two chapters at once. I don't like updating with less than 4,000 words for some reason.

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

- - -

As though Iruka carried the sun with him, the long Indian summer broke the next day and winter fell upon them with teeth and claws, biting too deep into these temperate lands.

Kakashi had always thought that Iruka seemed to bring warm weather with him, as though he had trapped the sun in skin like sheets of hammered bronze, in hair that carried the drowsy smell of heated summer air. Overnight, it disappeared with no gradual change. The trees had still blazed with red and gold leaves, the balmy air denying that this was their final swan song before winter. They didn't even have time to fall. By morning, they had frozen to the branches where they grew, pale and stiff like insect wings.

There were things to be done. They could use more wood for the fires. A path should be shovelled around the house before the snow crystallised into ice under its own weight. There were thin cracks in the walls and windows that needed to be blocked up. It did not concern either of them. Kakashi went out into the woods, and Itachi continued staring into blindspace. Once a week, someone they never saw brought supplies. Half the boxes built up, unopened, until they were hidden under snow drifts. Kakashi threw some of them to the birds when he remembered, until a week slipped by without him noticing, and their tiny corpses froze to the branches around the house.

They must have felt the cold, on some level. Kakashi noticed, vaguely, that his fingertips were always purplish, and his joints snapped and cracked with the wounded sound of frozen machinery started cold. He cut his hand one morning, and watched with mild interest as the snow melted and turned to fever-pink slush beneath him. His blood froze the bandage to his hand, and a week later, the cut was still open and bloodless like gashed ice, as though winter had set in through the wound.

Itachi said little, and none of it about the weather. His lips were the colour of a fresh bruise and the shadows under his eyes stood out like smudges of ash against his bloodless skin. His presence did not concern Kakashi. Itachi asked no questions, and his presence carried no weight. Without the Sharingan, his eyes were as empty as thin black glass laid over nothing at all.

There was plenty of dry wood laid by in the cellar. Neither of them cared enough to bring it up often. Kakashi made fires sporadically, and thought distantly of smudgy red irons and black flayed skin. Itachi did not seem to care. He was an Uchiha, and fire must run through him like blood, but he did not seem to miss it. His only concession to the weather was that he spent longer asleep, or in his room anyway. It was small, and as impersonal as the hospital room. Someone had removed any unnecessary furniture that he might fall over; that, or it was never there to begin with. The wind shredded itself through the cracks in the glass window, all the malice torn out of it so that all that seeped in was sad empty drafts.

His dreams were still mostly shapeless and formless, pieced together from the blind world around him. He dreamt of what it had been like to sleep in the hospital, of what it had been like to lie awake in the hospital, of what the days were like sitting downstairs staring into space. His world had always had no sights, and now it was nearly silent as well. The only sounds puncturing the day were the dull thuds of knives slamming home into frozen wood.

He did not dream of the nine-tailed monster again, but there had been one more new memory in his dreams.

_In his dreams, he had been sleeping too. He slept on the left side, keeping the stronger right hand free. There were kunai under the thin pillow, and a sheathed katana underneath the sheets, closer than any lover could be. Within the dream, he had came awake smoothly, calmly. The air was still and quiet. Nothing threatened. _

_Someone slid into the bed behind him. They were small and hot to the touch, in the way that very small children were. Itachi's eyes were open in the dream, and he knew that he could see if the room wasn't so dark. The part of him that knew this was a dream regretted that. The dim shapes ahead revealed nothing, and his dream-self did not seem interested in rolling over to see the visitor's face._

_The child behind him slid close, small arm wrapping around his shoulder, face burrowed into the back of his neck. Their breathing sounded drowsy and relaxed, as though they had come half-asleep. The arm pulled tight, small fist curled above his own hand, still resting on the hilt of the katana. Everyone else that had disturbed his sleep had been an enemy._

_I don't think you should come into my room at night, Sasuke._

Itachi woke up easily, back in his own room. The name fragmented and broke up into the rest of his ruined memories as he tried to catch on to it, crumbling like burning paper floating from a fire. He could still feel the ghost-memories of breath on the back of his neck, an arm thrown around his throat that was not a threat, the name still on the tip of his tongue.

It was later than he usually slept. The light was dim, but the dawn sounds had passed, and all he could hear now was the sullen, muffled beat of rain washing over the packed snow. He went into the bathroom and leaned in close, almost touching the mirror. The lights and shadows shifted vaguely, but would not clear. It was as though a layer of oil permanently covered his eyes, turning the world into a shapeless smear. He touched the cupboard door, his image trapped somewhere in the cool glass.

There were some things he could work out. From the locations of others' voices, he did not think he was strikingly tall or short. He was lean rather than broad. His hair was long, and lay heavy and slick against his spine. He wasn't practised enough to pick up anything from the shape of his features, save that they were rather narrow and not marked by scar tissue. His age was ambiguous. No wrinkles or softened skin around the eyes, and his voice was ageless.

_I don't think you should come into my room at night-_

The name wouldn't come again. But there was a shape with it, a simple outline of a fan that had came to him in the dream. He did not have to see it there to know that it had been stamped on almost every surface, emblazoned over and over again as if it meant anything at all. He sketched the shape, then paused and began methodically crossing it out until he could tell the image was obliterated because the paper was limp and falling apart from too much ink.

The pain behind his eyes was far worse, and the image was still blazing against the back of his eyelids, as though the sketched paper fan could fuel the fire that had burned as long as he remembered. Itachi stayed in his room, turning the few memories over and over to try and find meaning. A fan. A child. A nine-tailed monster.

The voices came again two or three hours later, resonating through his mind with the dull shock of steel striking steel.

_I heard Konoha might have him, yeah-_

_- that guy is too much trouble, seriously_

The voices cut off as abruptly as they began, leaving Itachi with the hot, oceanic sound of blood surging in his temples as he waited for the pain to pass so he could piece his churned up thoughts together. There had been a total of three voices. The first voice, in the hospital. _The vessel is weakening_, and again later. _The link is destroyed_. The second and third voices. _I heard Konoha might have him. That guy is too much trouble, seriously_.

His memories were gone. His mind was damaged. No one would be surprised to know he heard voices, either the product of a fragmented mind too split apart to tell where its own thoughts came from, or useless little bits and pieces of memories slipping through the ruin. That was what the medics would probably conclude. Itachi did not believe it at all, and he did not think Kakashi would either.

So that would leave him like some kind of damaged radio, still picking up broken bits of signal with no idea what they meant, or where they came from. Or if whoever was throwing them out knew that Itachi could overhear.

His thoughts began to fall back into place, the space behind his eyes still scraped raw and full of trapped sun. Too hot, even in the cool damp air inside the house, and he made his way down the stairs and out into the woods.

_

* * *

_

Kakashi had gone outside with vague thoughts of training, and done little. He was knee-deep in snow. The jealous winter air drained any heat from his skin. The knives almost burned to the touch.

He heard Itachi come out of the house and stand on the back porch. He ignored him, and threw a kunai at a scarred tree. Itachi did not startle at the sound. They had worked together before, for a little while. Maybe he could still remember his ANBU days on some unconscious level, remembered the way Kakashi worked without knowing that he knew.

_They hit the first group like a cat among the pigeons, three quarters of the ninja dead or dying before they had time to even look up. A moment to clear up, a carotid artery here or there to cut, tags taken from pockets, and the ANBU squads disappeared back into the trees like rain into the ocean._

_The second group were forewarned, somehow, and it does not go their way. A hail of knives hits them as soon as they break cover. Someone in a doe's mask is studded with too many kunai, all the grace gone mid-leap, and they hit the floor and roll over and over like an unravelling ball of yarn. Kakashi throws his arms up in time, takes three shallow knife wounds and lands in the thick of it without time to even yank the kunai free._

_They're all supposed to be anonymous in masks, but Itachi is identifiable if only because he's the youngest by three years. Someone from his squad, faceless in a boar mask, goes down with a katana between his shoulder blades. They meet briefly in the clashing blades, the Sharingan flashes in all that blank porcelain, and they continue on their way._

_Kakashi swiped sideways with a kunai, without thought, and swept away a knife thrown at Itachi's back. A dim metallic clang, lost in the sounds of battle, and it buries itself in a tree. The exploding tag detonates, blowing out puffs of sweet-smelling sawdust. Another half-second, and Itachi would have turned and knocked it carelessly aside himself._

_Or, in another world, Kakashi stands there, kunai in hand and only watches. And Itachi doesn't sense it coming, and it's too loud to even hear the unimpressive, muffled thud as it hits home in his back. His spine arches, a second before the tag explodes and the air mists scarlet. The fight goes on, and before they scatter, someone casts a quick jutsu that destroys Itachi's ragged remains. The Uchiha clan mourn the loss of their prodigy over an empty coffin._

_Five years later, Kakashi is assigned a team of genin. The blonde boy, the Kyuubi vessel, likes eating ramen and his ambition is to surpass the Hokage one day. Although, he adds with a cheeky smile, he also wants to try every type of ramen out there. The girl stammers that she wants to impress a special person, and hides her blushes behind her shiny sheet of pink hair. The Uchiha prodigy says his favourite hobby is training with his father, and his dream is to become a great a ninja as his brother, killed in action five years ago._

One simple action, done without thought. A thousand possibilities arise each time. One knife knocked aside, and Itachi dies a hero. And perhaps, some weeks later, the new squad captain makes a miscalculation where Itachi would not have done. A dead squad. A failed mission. All of Konoha fallen. There were too many possibilities. Kakashi stared at the black scarred tree. At each fork, the branches split into two, three, four, branching over and over until there were so many pathways that it was impossible to trace them back and tell which one was right.

He threw another knife. The next could go into Itachi. He bleeds out in the snow, melting it back to red water. Kakashi travels back to Konoha alone._ His memories came back. I couldn't take him alive_. No one blames him. The blood has cooled and the snow frozen around Itachi again by the time they return.

The knife hit home in half-frozen wood. Another world. Itachi lives. A week later, his memories return, and Kakashi dies here. Naruto is captured a week or two afterwards, and never returns, driving the knife a little further into Tsunade's wounded heart. No one saves Sasuke. A year later, Konoha falls beneath an unleashed Kyuubi.

He tugged the knives from the tree, three cold burns laid along his palm as though they were made from slices of raw moonlight, and began to walk back towards the house. Itachi was still there, face turned into a weary, lifeless winter wind that swept over the powdered snow with no enthusiasm in it.

Kakashi was half-way back when he felt a faint disturbance in the still winter air. He had set the seals around the house himself, and he could feel them breaking one by one, puffs of chakra floating away like dandelion seeds.

"Go back inside," Kakashi said.

* * *

Itachi could hear them coming, even though they moved lighter than powdery snow caught up in the wind. The still winter air carried even the soft scuffs as they moved from branch to branch, the faint brittle sound as their weight shook snow from frozen leaves. They landed with three soft thumps, no need to stay hidden when the copy ninja already knew they were there.

"We didn't come for you, Kakashi" the first voice was soft and androgynous, and not aggressive. "Stand aside."

"Or join in, if you like," the second was male, and sounded almost good-humoured.

"I have my orders," Kakashi didn't sound concerned. "Who sent you?"

"You cannot agree with these orders," the first voice again, ignoring the question.

"That wouldn't matter," Kakashi said indifferently. "And he is no threat."

"He will be one day. Do you want those deaths on your conscience?"

Kakashi laughed, softly. "Do you think a few more will make any difference?"

"I suppose not," the second voice speaking, still sounding good humoured, but faintly regretful, as if Kakashi had said he couldn't make a particular social occasion. "Then we fight?"

"We fight," Kakashi agreed, and filled the winter air with fire.

Itachi could not see any of it besides light and shadows, but there was the dull _whumph_ of flame, a sudden heat blossoming before them, and then a moment later, the clanging of knives and shuriken as the sheet of fire died away. He began cautiously retreating towards the steps back into the house, and then the ground was sinking below him like water, and he had to jump into blind space to escape as it opened up like a blossoming flower. He landed knee-deep in powdery snow, no longer certain exactly where he was in relation to the house or Kakashi.

Something split through the air with a sound like tearing sheets of paper, and he had to move backwards, clumsily, no way to tell whether this was Kakashi's jutsu or someone else. There was a brilliant white, magnesium flash he could see even through the darkness, and the torn air in its wake smelled clean like bleach and ozone. Knives clashed somewhere to the right. A whistle of shuriken. Someone cried out briefly, a little closer to Itachi. There may have been the soft thump of something falling in the snow, lost under the sound of battle.

Someone's knife skidded sideways across the snow, and he heard the sound of the blade cutting nothing but soft powder. No time to worry about what Kakashi might suspect, and Itachi needed a weapon. The iron almost seemed to sink into his hand, so cold that it burned like touching the purest sort of ice, carved from the heart of lands that never thawed.

A whistle, high and pure on the clear winter air, like a single musical note. He turned into the sound and blocked it easily, felt the dull shock travel up his arm as metal kissed metal, and it was not unfamiliar. The snow scrunched brittle as two people skidded closer, knives clashing. Itachi turned on the spot, listening for the sounds of another person lost under the sounds of battle.

There was the thin sound of ice cracking, and the earth opened up again, glittering snow filling the air like clouds come too close to earth, as whoever it was came up from the frozen ground almost beneath him.

The pain blazed white-hot as something surged up behind his eyes, too much raw energy forced through fragile human tissue, and Itachi was down on one knee when the world snapped into focus around him with the sick, sharp jolt of a dislocated joint pushed back into place. Too much uncontrolled chakra flooding in, slipping from his control, and if the pain had been bad before, it was nothing compared to this. Things _whirling_ in his eye, rearranging themselves, and the darkness was gone to a pure blazing white. A colourless winter sky, a black figure stamped against it, and he could read their movement like kanji shaped in bone and sinew. And it was so easy now with his vision back, the kunai playing over his hand, to turn over and drive up under the ribcage, and the dull shock travelled up to his own heart.

They had too much momentum and Itachi couldn't move fast enough with the pain surging behind his eyes, and they hit him, knife limp in their hand and already dying. He landed unharmed in snow, pushed aside the deadweight and saw for the first time in weeks.

The pale winter sunlight was too pure and too cold to stand, burning like bleach and fresh icewater. Everything was very clear beneath it. The trees were black scrawled outlines, leaves frozen to the branches in glassy grey clusters. Someone was sprawled on the ground, white uniform and white mask fading into whiter snow. The only colour came from the red patch blossoming just beneath the heart.

The pain came again, harder, like staring into the sun, and Itachi's hand splayed over his eye, over the burning as if it could be pushed back into black empty space. And then he saw Kakashi for the first time, saw the faint speculative look, and Itachi knew that Kakashi could somehow tell his sight was back.

There was only one ninja left. The second was struggling in the snow from where they had been brought down earlier. The mask had slipped, and she was only a young girl, knee-deep in melting snow and blood.

The third seemed to know that something had changed. Whoever it was, they did not hesitate before running forward, shaping seals rapidly. Itachi moved without thought, shifting from one seal to another almost before they had formed. The pain surged as something was gathering in on itself, as though he could tame the fire behind his eyes and spin brilliant gold threads through the crackling winter air.

_(black fire, not gold, streaming like onyx melted back to liquid glass-)_

"Stop that," Kakashi said, in a low voice, at the same time as some painless jutsu hit Itachi with a dull wave of air, and ended whatever may have began.

Kakashi was back battling with the last ninja, and Itachi left them. Too much light bouncing from the snow, white-hot as heated metal pressed against his eyes, but that wasn't why he went back into the house.

He went upstairs, suddenly clumsy, as though blindness had been his natural state. It was easier to shut his eyes and go by his own sightless map than to try and match it up with this new world superimposed on top. Into the bathroom, knocking something carelessly into the sink and letting it shatter as he forced open his eyelids, never mind the burn, and Itachi finally saw his own face.


	7. Chapter 7

Felix Culpa

Author's Notes – Sorry this took so long! For a chapter with little happening, it took forever before I was sort of happy with it. Thanks so much again for reviewing. I really enjoy writing this, and it's good to know people are following it (the number of alerts makes me super happy, I hadn't realised how much they were creeping up!)

There may be a couple of inaccuracies. Firstly, I'm not sure whether Kakashi was still in ANBU at the time of one of the flashbacks. And secondly, apparently in the post-timeskip anime, Kakashi doesn't seem to have an ANBU tattoo. This is set during the timeskip, so it's probably okay (and I'd set up some of the previous chapters involving it, so it would be awkward to cut it out now).

Disclaimer – I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.

- - -

Itachi's sight did not last long.

As soon as his vision came back, it began to slip. Chakra screwed out in hot, uncontrolled pulses with every heartbeat, and it felt as though something behind his eyes might split like damp tissue paper at one of those peaks. In the minutes he had left, he memorised his appearance and went downstairs to find Kakashi. One moment after he entered the living room where Kakashi was bandaging some minor wound, the world blinked out in a small dazzle of pain, like snuffing a candle flame with bare fingers.

There was the same feeling of dislocation, things sliding like machinery oiled in smooth membranous tissue, and his sight was gone. The pain faded in one small burst, little red sparks like dying fireworks scattering into the darkness, and then there was only the sort of dull ache that followed hard exercise.

Itachi carefully laid aside the few observations he had made within those minutes. None of them brought any memories, not yet. There had been no jolt of recognition at the sight of the copy ninja, or his own reflection. There were only small details he filed away in his mind for later use. The attackers had worn no headbands, but he noted the precise styles of their white uniforms, which could point to a particular village. Kakashi was younger than he had expected, and wore a headband tilted over a scarred and closed eye. Should the occasion arise, it would be best to attack Kakashi from the left side.

He had memorised his own appearance. Itachi was younger than he would have expected, maybe only seventeen or eighteen. A simple, swirled tattoo was stamped on his upper arm in black ink that looked almost wet against his pale skin. He had narrow, sober features, cast into shadow by heavy bangs and the bruise-coloured smudges spreading from his eyes. The eyes themselves were the most striking part of his appearance. They were a deep velvet red, swirled with black, the sign of the-

_Sharingan_. A bloodline limit exclusive to the Uchiha family. Enhanced clarity of perception, and the ability to copy jutsu by sight alone. Factual knowledge spilled out like a dropped book falling open to the right page, but there were still no memories behind it. If Itachi had the Sharingan, then he was an Uchiha, but he had no memories of growing up in a clan of pale, red-eyed ninja who could spin fire from air and trap enemies in the hypnotic world behind their Sharingan. Itachi left that train of thought for now, and returned to the current situation.

"Who were they?" he asked, expecting no answers.

"I don't know," Kakashi said, shortly. "They're dead now."

"They didn't come for you."

"No."

Itachi took his usual seat. He waited a few minutes to let the silence smooth back over, before he spoke again.

"We have the same tattoo," Itachi said, neutrally.

Kakashi's head jerked minutely. He didn't hide the ANBU sign as such, but it was rarely on view and without his sight, Itachi couldn't see either Kakashi's or his own tattoo. He glanced down at the bandages over his arm, and then looked up. Itachi wasn't wearing as many layers as usual, and the cut he had received weeks earlier was a thin, scabbed line cutting through the ANBU design like the scratch he had once put through Konoha's symbol.

Itachi's eyes were raised, fixed on Kakashi's own as though he could see through the blindness to any lies. In the dim light they were fathomless like cores cut from night sky, from all that lonely space where there was nothing but miles of empty air and the cool, remote fire of stars too far away to touch it. But they gave nothing away and opened up onto nothing but itself all the way into Itachi's mind, no way to tell if whoever he once was might still be pacing down there beneath all the shadows.

"An organisation we were both part of," Kakashi said. Excuses had came to mind- all Konoha ninja have them, a sign from the Academy- but there seemed little point in lying now. He already knew how it would go from here. Either Itachi's memories would return and one of them would kill the other, or Tsunade would finally let him return to active service, and either someone else would babysit Itachi or Kakashi's first new order would be to kill him. If he triggered a new memory, it was only a matter of a few days less here or there.

Itachi added it to the fragments of information he had been acquiring, storing up in case he needed them. _We were both part of the same organisation. The boy is impulsive. The teacher has a past with Kakashi. They are Konoha ninja. Kakashi may be blind on his left side. _

"What sort of organisation?"

"Special forces," Kakashi said. "We didn't work together long."

"Why?"

"You left Konoha."

Itachi nodded, and left the room. He did not question further. Perhaps the ninja might answer. The problem with directly asking questions was that it gave away information at the same time as receiving it. If Kakashi answered his questions, Kakashi would know how much Itachi knew. He could feed false information, if he wished. Itachi preferred to glean one small fact at a time, reading between the lines to find the truth.

He went outside. The wind died softly in the weighted branches and left the air silent and impossibly cold, as though it drained the heat and sound and life from everything around it. A voice, the sugar scrunch of shoes in snow, a single breaking branch would shatter this brittle air apart. It would be irrelevant if he heard a skilled assassin coming. Itachi could track their movements by sound alone, but he was uncertain whether he would be able to hold his own in a fight. Jutsu had came automatically, a simple kneejerk reaction, and not one he could safely test. It had felt like fire, _blackfire_, but nothing that could be so easily tamed.

He practised activating whatever it was he had felt behind his eyes. Over and over, something slid without catching, like flipping a light switch when the electricity was thrown out. Nothing happened. The vessels behind his eyes began to ache as though he had flexed sprained muscles. When the Sharingan had first came, it had caught with a spark, pain spreading backwards like lit coal seams into his mind as though a window had been thrown open and let the whole world in.

Itachi could not risk further damage, and he let it go. The pain was getting less as time passed. If he was lucky, it would heal itself before the ninja was given new orders.

He stayed outside. There was no particular reason why he should, and plenty why he should return to the house. There could be more assassins around. Or the weather alone made the world outside treacherous. There was snow crushed to crystal beneath the drifts, and no way to tell where they lay until he was knee-deep in soft, numbing nothingness. It was too cold to stay outside either. It wasn't like some of the frozen lands that he didn't remember visiting. He didn't need to worry that a snowstorm would fall on him, the air full of ground-glass teeth, stirring the world up until he could no longer get to shelter and froze where he fell. There were no black, glassy cracks in the earth hidden under thin crusts of ice, and no packs of half-starved, shaggy creatures sleeping beneath the snow. Still, it was cold enough that he could fall ill, something that might leave him weak and feverish for a week or two, and he did not have those weeks to spare.

Itachi didn't return. The cold was not unbearable. The air was brittle and clear, burning like quicksilver vapour in his lungs, but it did not awaken him. It spread like anaesthesia, numbing him to clumsy, frozen deadweight. His mind began to congeal, as though it was pulling away from the coldness and curling into itself. Thoughts froze and died before they could be properly formed. The Sharingan spun into a meaningless, Catherine wheel smudge of colour. The snatches of distant voices speaking into his mind faded out into static, like the white noise of snowstorms. The hot memory of someone's arm around him cooled until he felt it no more than the bite of the glassy winter air.

Night was coming. The pain in his eyes simmered down to a dull ache, and he knew the bleachy, blue-white snow-glare was fading as the sun began to set. The warmth and light drained from the forest, and Itachi knew that in those fierce white skies, the setting sun would be as weak and red as the diluted blood that had spilled out into the snow. But it wasn't evening he pictured when he thought about red light, it was-

_Dawn_

It was a red dawn breaking, scarlet-stained clouds suspended in skies still dark. The weak red light wasn't fading into night, it was spreading from a bloody sun trapped in the teeth of a mountain range. The sun still out of sight, but the light was sinking inexorably into the world below, and wherever it fell the land was stained crimson-

The red dawn, the _akatsuki_, brought a jumble of images that made no sense. Black ink-drops swirling in red eyes. Red clouds drifting in black skies. Black crucifixes etched against streaming red skies. Red blood splashes on a black, nightdark street, except a pale and jealous moon had stolen all the colour from the world that night, that last night before a-

- a red dawn breaking.

* * *

Kakashi had replaced the broken seals, reinforced them and gone back inside. Itachi was still out in the snow somewhere, and he let the hours drift by, unconcerned. Night came on quickly after a short and bloody sunset. The air seeping through the cracks in the window was cool and faintly charged, but nothing stirred outside.

_The lights were all out across the street. A black cat slid like spilled oil across a rooftop, turned to stare at Kakashi as though its marshlight eyes could see him there, and was gone. He should be sleeping. There had been a mission that night, nothing too dangerous, a little information gathering with his clone while Kakashi remained at a safe distance. But the effort had worn down his chakra, and they had travelled hard and fast on the way home._

_He was still waiting, and no idea what it was for, not until someone in a crow's mask alighted on his windowsill and Kakashi didn't startle. "There's trouble at the Uchiha complex," the ANBU member said briefly, voice hollow behind the thin porcelain, and he was gone. _

_Kakashi's first thought on the way over was an internal dispute of some type, maybe a branch family out to assassinate someone a little too influential. He did not suspect anyone else was involved, because no one could go against all the Uchihas, against a clan that could police a village of ninja. _

_And when he got there, every one was dead._

_At first, they followed standard procedure at every house. Lining up along the walls, two ready at the doors, long range specialists at the back, bursting in with weapons out to catch anyone inside. After the first few, they stopped and simply wandered from house to house as though in a dream, no longer in a hurry because there was no one left to save. _

_A few had put up a fight. A constellation of kunai studded a wall outside, the blades clean from cutting only air. One corpse had a gash across both forearms, thrown up before a blade. Another was crumpled in his doorway, katana in hand, time enough to run out into the street after locking his family in the cellar. They were still there, dead._

_But for the most part, they seemed to die too fast, with a knife in the back or a throat opened with a neat, efficient line across the carotid artery. All the open eyes had the wet glitter of rain over black stone, dead too quick to even activate the Sharingan. _

_Another house. Two corpses on the floor. Kakashi swept around once, routinely checking cut throats and split hearts for any signs of life. In the darkness, it would have been easy to miss the small figure, backed as far into the corner as they could go._

"_There's a survivor," he said briefly, and let someone in an adder mask flow past him. Her hands glided over the child, checked for serious injuries and picked it up when none were found. The child stared blankly at Kakashi over her shoulder. He didn't recognise them. One of several pale, dark-eyed, dark-haired Uchiha children, too young to even tell their gender at first._

_The ANBU ninja turned the child around, away from the corpses opened up and seeping into the family's floor. "Itachi-" the child said, into her shoulder, and Kakashi vaguely knew who the survivor was. Itachi never talked about his family, never talked about anything besides the mission, but he had heard there was a brother starting at the academy. One or two of the jounin had wondered if he might be another prodigy, and that was all he had known._

"_It's okay," the woman said, her voice strange and alien behind the frozen mask, no comfort for a child who must have spent most of the night in here with his dead parents. "We're looking for your brother now-"_

"_No," his voice was muffled, distressed. "Itachi killed them-"_

Kakashi woke up some hours later. A milky moonlight spilled around the edges of the curtains like a damp stain, not enough to properly illuminate the room. The house was still empty, which meant Itachi had not returned. It wasn't any real concern. He wouldn't have gone far, and Kakashi thought he could handle a night outside without anything worse than a chill.

He went out into the snow anyway.

The night was very still. The thin moonlight bounced back a thousand times from the snow until it was almost painfully bright. Kakashi had left the ninja where they had fallen, and the glittering snow had frozen around them. The girl's pale hair was webbed together with frost. Her bloodless features and drowned white eyes seemed to barely disturb the snow, rising out of the drifts like an optical illusion formed by the aimless swirl of winter wind. It was difficult to tell they had been alive only a few hours ago.

It would be troublesome to dig them out now, and he supposed they'd probably keep better there than anywhere else. The next snowfall would bury them, and he could point out where they were next time someone came to check up on the situation. He didn't think it would trouble himself or Itachi to walk out over snow seeded with corpses, and know their milky eyes still stared upwards into packed ice.

Itachi hadn't gone out far, only minutes' walk from the house. His chakra control was too erratic to walk over snow; that or he hadn't even tried, and Kakashi could easily follow the churned up trails he had left behind. He followed the gashed and wounded snow in aimless circles, out near where the seals had been placed.

Itachi was knee-deep in the drifts, facing away from the house. It was a moment before he seemed to notice Kakashi's presence; blinked and came back into the winter night from wherever he had gone in his emptied mind. But his eyes still looked blank, like the smoky glass from a blown light bulb, and his breathing came harsh and erratic like air rasping over a knife edge.

"You're starting to remember," Kakashi said, and it was not a question.


	8. Chapter 8

Felix Culpa

Author's Notes- Sorry, didn't realise nearly a month had passed! This chapter isn't very interesting, so I was waiting to upload it with the next, but that would take even longer, so here it is for now. Unless I suddenly get inspired, there should be another two chapters to go, and then it's over. Thanks to everyone who has stuck with it so far.

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.

- - -

It was far from warm inside the house, but the walls and cracked windows offered some thin protection from the snow and the chilled air that seemed to roll up from it in slow, glassy waves like cyanide vapours. As the numbness wore off into prickly, painful heat, Itachi's thoughts began to stir like a hive warming up in summer, until his mind buzzed with too many images to keep track of. He laid the fragments of memory out over and over again to try and see the patterns that linked them. A fan stamped on stone, a child, a nine-tailed monster. Sharingan eyes and crucifixes and a red dawn breaking. None of it made any sense alone, or with the bits and pieces of knowledge he had laid aside. Itachi had been a member of a special forces unit. His clan were dead. He had clearly been some kind of missing-nin, important enough to be kept alive.

None of the pieces would fit. It was like sifting through a thousand broken glass shards, trying to put them back together without knowing what it had once been.

By the time Itachi gave up trying to find the patterns, dawn was seeping in like overflowing drain water, thin and grey. When he slept, his dreams were the same meaningless jumble of snapshots from a life he didn't remember, spilling through his fingers as he tried to hold onto them.

* * *

Kakashi didn't mention anything about the night before. If Itachi was picking up fragments of memory here or there, he didn't seem too concerned by it. 

"Want to spar?"

"I can't see."

"Or mould chakra," Kakashi agreed. "No jutsu, and I'll wear a blindfold."

He lowered the forehead protector over both eyes. He could fight by sound well enough. Standard ninja training. Plenty of opponents would use mist or shadows, or could kill you if you met their eyes. He'd come to rely on his other senses a little more after losing his eye. The depth perception was always slightly off after that, and he'd learned to compensate for it.

"It isn't a good idea," Itachi said, flatly, and Kakashi shrugged and pushed his forehead protector back up over his working eye. He supposed it was suicidally stupid to deliberately put himself at a disadvantage anyway. It wouldn't look well on the memorial stone. _Sharingan Kakashi, Copy Ninja of a Thousand Jutsu. Killed playing Blindman's Buff._

He crossed over to the window and saw nothing at all beneath the soft blur of snow. Even the deer had moved closer to the village and the hay that the Nara clan left out, and nothing stirred out there. The wind had died too, as though it had frozen and fallen to the ground to shatter in long glassy shards, and now there was not even its lonely white noise to break the silence.

It was not a problem they faced in the Fire Country, but Kakashi had heard that people snowbound too long in a place like this could be driven insane. He imagined the isolation might not be so bad without the white static skies and the suffocating silence outside. He'd experienced sensory deprivation enough to see how it might happen. It was difficult to understand just how thick and oppressive pure silence could be, how hours of it could get inside the head and curdle there until it bore down heavier than any sound. Here, the only thing to break the silence was himself or Itachi, as though the world had shrunk down to nothing more than this. Long hours would roll by in that strange and ominous quiet, waiting for the next sound to come and fracture it.

Someone should visit soon. Tsunade had said she would call by every couple of weeks. Kakashi expected the weather had delayed her. Over a month had passed without seeing anyone except Naruto and Iruka, and he was unsure if they would come back. It didn't seem to matter too much. He'd always found it suffocating to share his space, always had to live along back when there was Iruka and Team 7 and plenty of what he supposed people would call friends, but between the two of them here, they barely seemed to make up one person.

"How long?" Itachi asked, abruptly, a ripple in the heavy silence that shivered like gel and settled itself around them again.

"They gave me two months," Kakashi said. His voice should be too loud in this quiet, but instead, it sounded muffled and remote, as though he spoke from somewhere very far away.

"And then..?"

"Probably," Kakashi said. "Unless you kill me."

Itachi was unreadable. "Is that likely?"

Kakashi shrugged. He had a decent chance, better than anyone else. He could follow Itachi's movements with the Sharingan, and see through at least some of the genjutsu. On the other hand, the Sharingan cut both ways. He was not meant to use it, and a prolonged fight would drain his chakra. Neither was it evolved to the same level as Itachi's. Kakashi had never seen the pattern in Itachi's eye that had brought him to the land of the red moon.

But then, he had a wider range of jutsu than Itachi did. He'd actively used his Sharingan to go out and seek new techniques, while Itachi seemed to do little besides counter attacks in battle. Kakashi expected he had more experience too. He was five years older, and Itachi seemed to have lay low during his time with Akatsuki.

"It could happen," he said.

Itachi nodded, and went to leave, back to his room. He was in the doorway before he paused, as though something had occurred to him.

"Would many mourn you?" he asked.

It was oddly out of character for Itachi, and Kakashi wondered exactly what he was remembering. Then he considered the question. The other jounin would. Those he had worked with genuinely liked him, and the rest at least respected him. They'd add Kakashi to a long list of fallen names, and he supposed they'd mourn him with whatever was left over after a lifetime of watching comrades die. His name would be pointed out to academy children like all the other legendary ninja, interesting enough to tell them about his thousand jutsu, the techniques he developed, how he was the only Sharingan user outside the Uchiha clan. He'd had a fairly long and illustrious career already, more so than many other ninja. Partly due to his talent, partly due to good judgement, and not a little down to luck and other people.

_Sometimes he still heard the throaty sound of rock beginning to grind together in his dreams. Not the most clever trap, no more so than the hundreds of others he had already evaded at that age. But it didn't matter either way, the ninja had triggered it, and the world began to fall in upon itself around them. The air was full of stone-dust and the dull rumble of grounded thunder, and only a Sharingan could have followed the last second of it, Obito moving so fast that Kakashi was on the ground feeling the subdued, wet crunch of bone splintering inside flesh beside him before his own nervous system registered the pain in his head._

_There were a thousand ways it could have gone differently. Another trap triggered, and someone hurt too badly to carry on. They never get this far. Or Kakashi doesn't delay when they need to rescue Rin. A slight turn to one side into his blindspot, and he's safe and out of the way, and Obito only needs to watch out for himself._

_Too many possibilities again. Obito lives. Fate gives Kakashi his friend- at least, on loan- until the Uchiha massacre. It hurts worse and longer this time. And Obito is mourned by plain old Kakashi, not Sharingan Kakashi of a thousand jutsu. He dies a year or two later in any one of the situations when his Sharingan would have saved him._

_Or Obito lives, still best friends with the prodigy Kakashi, who might exceed Itachi himself. Still growing closer since their near-miss, and the massacre never happens. A handful of deaths, maybe three or four before Itachi meets Obito and Kakashi, and dies then and there._

_Or the rocks are still falling, but Obito doesn't push Kakashi out of the way. His life is smashed out into the ground. A little of Rin dies with him. Obito is killed in the Uchiha massacre anyway. When Akatsuki walk in Konoha, Kakashi is not there to confront them._

He blinked, and came back to the current day, and "Yes," he said. The jounin would mourn Kakashi. Tsunade, in her own way, is fond of him. His team too, maybe not whatever used to be Sasuke, but Sakura and Naruto would be distraught. They'd get over it, eventually, but they were still young enough that they had plenty of tears left over for him. And Iruka would genuinely mourn him, even if he had always half-expected it would happen. Kakashi had not lied when he told Sasuke that all those important to him had died, but there would be no shortage of flowers on his grave.

* * *

Another two weeks slipped away. Iruka and Naruto came by again. Kakashi watched them approaching the house, oddly fascinated. They seemed out of place here. Naruto was too bright and alive, bounding through all that blank snow in flashes of blonde and blue and orange. The light snow seemed to melt as soon as it touched Iruka, as though winter could not set into him and drain the warmth from his autumn-gold skin. 

Iruka largely ignored Kakashi, and watched stiffly over Naruto until it was time to leave. Naruto brought news about the village. He was currently training with Lee and Gai after Jiraiya had mysteriously disappeared, the same morning Tsunade woke up with a three-day hangover in the demolished remains of what was once a perfectly serviceable bar. Someone matching Sasuke's description had been seen near the Bird Country. Sakura had resumed her training under the Hokage, and Naruto confessed she was getting "really scary". There were rumours that Neji might make jounin soon.

Kakashi realised, with a mild shock, that he hadn't thought about any of the people in a long time. He tried to picture them. Sasuke, exiled perhaps, wandering a lonely path across the world, chasing rumours and revenge. The sparks of chakra from Neji's quick, clever hands, striking with the grace of a dancer and the precision of a surgeon. Sakura training in the snow, pink and green like spring flowers come too early. The news seemed impossible remote, something that might have happened a lifetime ago and already gone to faded sepia images in an old man's memory.

Tsunade came not long afterwards, two days after Naruto had bounded back out into the snow, taking with him the thin life he seemed to have brought stirring around the house.

Kakashi was around the back when she arrived. He saw the way she looked at him, and glanced down and noticed the things she saw. The wound that still had not healed, the edges strangely glassy. The paleness. The extra pounds that had fallen away. He was not dressed for this weather. Iruka had once told him, affectionately, that Kakashi reminded him of a scarecrow, and he supposed that would be particularly true now. He could vaguely see the resemblance. He had always been rather tall and lanky, slightly awkward in public as though none of him quite matched up. It wasn't until he began moving that things fell together properly.

"How are things?" she asked, walking back to the house with him. She used her chakra to walk over the drifts of uncleared snow, leaving no more footprints than a ghost. Kakashi ploughed through it. He was numb up to the knees, but he liked leaving the churned up snow behind him. He could follow where he had been that day, written in the snow, great crazy loops spiralling around the woods.

"Things are fine," he said.

"Any sign of Itachi's memories returning?"

"Nothing coherent."

"Any changes at all?"

"He can activate the Sharingan if he has to. He hasn't tried to use it."

Tsunade exhaled, and stopped before they reached the house. She stepped lightly onto the porch. Kakashi remained where he was, knee-deep in the drifts.

"Where is he?"

Kakashi glanced up at the skies. Sometimes he lost track of the time of day. The sun burned high and white in the pale frozen sky, so he supposed it would be around midday, which would mean Itachi was no longer in his room.

"Downstairs," he said.

"Do you need anything? More reading materials, or medical supplies? Or I can arrange to have someone sent out if you-"

"No. Why Iruka?" He asked abruptly. The question had been on his mind for all these weeks. There were better chuunin, and plenty of jounin for that matter, even if they couldn't spare one of the ANBU members already in on the mission.

"He will always act in Naruto's best interest," Tsunade said, evasively.

"Liar. He's too close to think rationally."

"I thought he could tell best if something was wrong," she admitted. "He knew you better than-"

"We're fine."

"I was asking about you."

There was a moment of silence. Tsunade's intelligent amber eyes flickered to the darkened windows. Kakashi still hadn't opened the curtains since those first few days, and she would not be able to tell if Sharingan eyes burned like banked coals in those shadows.

"The light hurts his eyes," Kakashi said, on the chance that she might be wondering about it. Tsunade didn't acknowledge him.

"Do you want to be relieved from your duty?" she asked, now studying the blank skies, not looking at Kakashi.

"I'm on leave," he reminded her.

"Exactly. I'm not sure you're resting. We worry about you."

He stepped out of the snow onto the porch besides her. Tsunade looked directly at him now, all pretence of subtlety gone. It was never her style.

"Maybe it would be better to send out someone else. You're-"

"Not well?" he supplied helpfully.

"I didn't say that," she protested.

"There isn't long to go now," he reminded her, and then stepped back into the snow. After a moment, Tsunade followed and began walking alongside him in silence, back into the woods until they reached the seals.

"Someone tried to assassinate Itachi," he told her, as she stepped through the barrier he had set up.

Her back stiffened. "Not-?"

"No," Sasuke would have come by himself, and Kakashi supposed he might have succeeded too. If keeping Itachi alive came at the risk of killing Sasuke, there was no contest. He'd have to step aside unless there was any way he could guarantee disabling both of them at once.

Tsunade nodded. "I'll find out who it is, and post a squad around the forests."

Kakashi didn't answer. She looked at him for one long moment, something she wanted to say hanging in the frozen air, and then she let it go with a light sigh. He nodded, and as though given permission to leave, Tsunade turned and walked back towards Konoha without a backwards glance. Kakashi watched for a while, until he realised the green of her jacket and the subdued gold of her hair had long faded into the black and white puzzle of snow and trees.

* * *

The woman from the hospital was there. Itachi heard the soft whickering as she walked over snow, the wet sound of Kakashi plunging through the drifts at her side. Their voices sounded muted and far away, fading as they walked back out into the snow, and Itachi considered what orders were being given. He did not follow them. 

It would be weeks, if that, and a lot of time had already passed. Itachi didn't try for the Sharingan. It was the voices he thought about then. They had been useless so far, little fragmented sentences that gave nothing away, but now he reached out to this one source of information, and for a few seconds, he felt himself suddenly _click_, as though he had found a radio station in the middle of too much static. And for a moment, the world wavered and blurred around him, and it wasn't blindspace or the room around him that he saw, it was a cavern and the vague outlines of people standing in a circle, flickering like candle flame.

_-and go to Konoha_


	9. Chapter 9

Felix Culpa

Author's Notes- Doing the final edit the day after New Year's eve was probably not the best idea I've ever had, but at least it helps when trying to come up with forty interesting ways to describe a Sharingan headache, which I cannot believe is any more grim than a New Year hangover.

So.. finally finished! I'm sorry the relationship never really develops, but I don't think it's possible at this stage in canon. Maybe if it's set before the massacre, or once more is known about why Itachi killed his clan. Thank you very much to everyone who has stuck with this, and I hope the last two chapters don't disappoint.

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.

- - -

The static outlines bled and swam like oil over water as the link began to break, and then the Sharingan slid into place as Itachi's vision rearranged itself to see the dim walls inside the house.

It stung a little, like a finger pressing into a fresh graze, but it was not unbearable. Itachi blinked slowly, eyelids grating like sandpaper. Beneath his temple, the pulse beat hot and frantic like a trapped butterfly bearing itself to death. He supposed that would be uncontrolled chakra ticking over behind his eyes, too much of it running through vessels too recently healed. It was impossible to rein it in, like catching smoke between his fingers. That was not important right now.

Someone was coming.

Itachi didn't know who the organisation were. If he had shared a mind link of some kind, it was likely that he had once been a member. The thought was not reassuring. He would be of little use to anyone like this. The Sharingan only came sporadically, and he had nothing to compare with to see if permanent damage had been done. His jutsu knowledge may have gone the same way as his memories, and no way to tell how much would be returned.

Whoever was coming could be ordered to retrieve Itachi, or to silence him. Even simply knowing that he had been part of an organisation troubled him. It did not feel right. It had come as no surprise to Itachi that he was a missing nin. He felt no affinity to anything, no need to form alliances unless it was somehow _necessary._ And that was what troubled him. If he had been part of an organisation, it would have been mutually beneficial at best-

-and a planned double-cross, at worst. Itachi still had no memories of how he had ended up like this. He had assumed a run-in with Konoha ninja, explaining why he had woke up in their custody. Perhaps the copy ninja, who was clearly still recovering from recent injuries. But he considered another possibility now, that he could have made enemies of former allies. And there was no way to tell how dangerous the voices were, not when he could sense no chakra around them, and suspected they were little more than telepathic ghosts. The members themselves could be anywhere at all, and no way to tell how long he had.

Itachi went downstairs slowly, not letting the Sharingan slip yet. A twinge rose at each step, spreading like a tuning fork from his eyes. It was painful, and he would deactivate it soon, before they were strained and damaged further. But the pain was nothing at all compared to the first time the Sharingan had came.

He was healing. He didn't know if it was fast enough.

Itachi hadn't paid attention to the house the first time his sight had returned, but the Sharingan mapped everything whether he cared about it or not. He already knew there was nothing worth seeing inside. There were no photographs or pictures on the scarred walls, no possessions left scattered around, nothing that would give him any insight into who he was. Itachi had concluded he had been right from the start. They were staying in some kind of lodge that belonged to no one in particular.

The temperature began to drop downstairs, cool air and brittle snowlight seeping in without enthusiasm. The back door was open, a stark white slice of light among the dusty shadows inside the house. Outside, the snow had fallen again, and healed over the signs of battle like smooth and glassy scar tissue. It was only broken by the churned-up trails leading back towards the house, and Itachi was not surprised when he turned to follow them, and saw Kakashi standing near the open door.

Kakashi looked up mildly as Itachi's eyes fell on him. There was no surprise in his expression. "Someone try to kill you again?"

Itachi paused, waited for an explanation.

"Sharingan," Kakashi said, neutrally. "It often activates in dangerous situations."

Itachi carried on past Kakashi, down the steps and sinking into the snow. The Sharingan had already mapped the clearing outside. If it hadn't, he would never have noticed the faintest rises in the snow, that might only be the random patterns shaped by the wind, and might have been where the ninja had fallen. If there had been time, it may have been worth finding out who they were, but dead enemies were irrelevant now.

He walked through the clearing, past the drifts and the assassins and all their secrets frozen with them in glassy red ice, towards the forest.

"You shouldn't leave it activated too long," Kakashi said, almost as though it was an afterthought, and Itachi turned, at the edge of the woods. "Your partner said it was damaging your eyesight," and Kakashi closed the door behind himself.

"_You won't be much of a copycat if I cut out this eye-"_

"_Cut out both!"_

_Raucous laughter. Kakashi wondered, vaguely, what he'd do if they did take the Sharingan. It wasn't as if he really used it that much in combat. It wasn't often that he had to. He had been a prodigy before Obito's gift, and he'd probably stored up more than enough jutsu for the rest of his life. But it was nice to have around. Maybe when Sasuke came back to the village, Kakashi could ask him to bring back Itachi's eye as a souvenir for him. Maybe both, if they blinded him here, except then he'd have to wear his forehead protector like a blindfold._

_The thought struck him as irrationally funny, and he began to laugh. His throat was raw by the time he realised he'd simply forgotten to stop._

Obito's gift hadn't been much of a present, at first. The Sharingan felt separate, lodged in his eye like a splinter from one of the rock shards that had came crashing down around him, heavy as sin. It wasn't compatible with him. A thousand tiny anatomical differences written into the Uchiha DNA were missing. His chakra was forced to reroute itself through vessels that were never meant to direct all the power of the Sharingan. He'd passed out twice as his chakra simply flowed straight out into nowhere, as though it had thrown open a floodgate he couldn't shut.

He had almost rejected it. Kakashi's eyes had burned red and angry for a month, flooded with so many irritated tears that he never knew if he had really cried at all in that time. The entire socket dappled black and purple with bruises and dried scabs, and beneath them, the wound healed itself into a furrow of scar tissue as neat and clean as the white strips that had held the raw edges together. But the pain had sank in far deeper than the medic nins could reach with their chakra and stitches, and he had came close to cutting it out so many times, spent many nights awake with the blade of a kunai cool against his burning eyelid.

He watched with Sharingan eyes while they buried the rest of Obito- or maybe just an empty coffin, if they hadn't been able to retrieve him from under those rocks, and Kakashi never asked either way. Wherever they'd put him in the ground, the last piece of Obito still burned in his eye, a restless ghost sealed in scar tissue, still tethered to the living in brilliant plumes of blood.

The medical ninja had grown impatient with Kakashi in the weeks that had followed. They had given him stronger and stronger painkillers that left him half-sedated, and finally something that blocked all pain signals entirely, and it was never enough. "Are you sure it's not psychosomatic?" they had asked, and eventually, he had stopped going. He'd got through it himself. He'd worked out that so long as it was covered, it didn't tear through his chakra like a forest fire, burning up everything he had. And eventually, the pain had passed, although he could always feel the strange weight of it, filtering the world through a dead boy's eye.

* * *

Kakashi had the Sharingan.

Itachi's eyes were hot and sore, but his vision still held together. It was clear enough that he had even seen the flow of chakra around Kakashi, strange and splintery and white, like grounded lightning. Kakashi would be naturally predisposed towards electricity jutsu. It was useful to know, but it was not the normal flow of chakra that had caught Itachi's attention. Over the eye he had assumed was missing, chakra rolled and boiled in the centre like an angry whirlpool. He didn't need to see the black and red to know that it was the Sharingan burning like a sunspot beneath the forehead protector.

Kakashi had said that all his clan were dead. Itachi did not immediately dismiss the idea that he could be an Uchiha. The colouring was uncharacteristic, and the other visible eye was black, but it was not impossible for the Sharingan to only ever activate in one eye. Neither did it seem impossible that a damaged Sharingan might become impossible to deactivate, in the same way that Itachi had not been able to consciously turn his on. An injury could cause it, and the scar over the eye was clear beneath the forehead protector.

But it wasn't right. The swirling spot of chakra had rolled and turned on itself like a storm trapped in a jar. The flow of chakra had looked wrong, all wrong, even if he had nothing to compare it with. It had reminded him of the flow of chakra around unhealed wounds, the chaotic way the energy cracked and snapped where vessels were broken and blocked.

Either it was a severely damaged Sharingan, or there was another reason why it seethed like a swarm of angry wasps, and that explained why Kakashi didn't look like an Uchiha, and why the Sharingan was swirling meaninglessly into the darkness behind the head band.

He wasn't meant to use the Sharingan.

Itachi continued into the forest until he found the seals, and paused. They did not repel him like a trap. The air only seemed to thicken as he approached, and if he kept pushing into it, it would stop altogether like elastic pulled too far. When he brushed snow away from the seals, he felt a bubble of air shift around it like a bead of mercury, as though pushing together two opposing magnets.

He turned back. There was no way to subtly dismantle the barriers without Kakashi knowing; and besides, there was nowhere to go anyway.

He walked around the sealed area anyway, and noted the location of each one. They were in a fairly wide area, perhaps five minutes direct walk in any direction from the house before meeting a seal. The trees were all old. Well-established woodland then, and deep into the forest as well if the deer wandered so freely. A slow moving stream cut through one corner, and he paused besides it. The surface was sluggish and grey, slowed down by the ice-slush forming towards the bank, between the pale and glassy reeds-

_And besides another river somewhere, someone was sat, turned away from where Itachi watched. The pale slash of face visible beneath the heavy bangs was relaxed, almost slack, as though the strings holding it in place had fallen loose. The boy was writing too easily, words tumbling from the pen without any hesitation at all. Itachi could feel the kanji streaming through his own mind in time with the small movements of the pen. His own lips moving slightly, shaping the words as they were laid down on paper._

_A kunai pinned the note to a tree, the ink still gleaming wet on the messy signature that sewed up the words like a suture and made them real. The boy did not pause as he turned and went smoothly and unresisting, straight into the river. He did not turn to see the world he was leaving behind. He did not stop and stare at that world's pale and broken reflection, fractured in the river's surface. And he did not flinch away as the water wrapped itself welcoming around him, not even the fingers curling reflexively away from the cool bite of the river lapping at his hands. A small, heated spot beginning to burn between Itachi's eyes with concentration, holding this fragile link like a strand of spider-silk between them._

_He watched with blazing-hot eyes as the stranger calmly walked out into the depths where the current ran smooth and oiled below the surface. The head jerked back as the riverbed was snatched from underneath him, and he was gone._

_And the boy was still breathing easily, because in his mind, he was still sprawled on the river bank. Itachi saw through the stranger's eyes as he shaped the world around it. The end of a summer afternoon was spilling like syrup and crushed golden peach flesh across the blue skies. The river ran thick and slow, the colour of clotted sunlight. It was quiet now, the last musical echoes of clashing kunai perhaps still dying somewhere in that hazy summer air. _

_The illusion was perfect. The boy could even feel the slow prickling ache from too much training, rubbing together fingertips that had gone papery too close to fire jutsu. And then the boy looked up, and Itachi saw his own face through the stranger's eyes. He looked impossibly young, perhaps only thirteen or fourteen, and the lines below his eyes were still just smudges, as though he had rubbed his eyes with ashy fingers. And those eyes were still black, back before the Sharingan had burned slow and constant within them. _

_The boy stretched out, not minding the dull twinge from strained muscles. His rasping breathing was beginning to settle back into a normal rhythm, the only sound in the comfortable hush that had fallen between them. He turned to Itachi, opened his mouth to speak, and water rolled out-_

_For one moment, he felt the sear of water rolling like a drop of lit oil through his lungs, and then Itachi's mind clamped down hard, and the boy did not feel the spongy tissues clotting together like wet tissue, and he did not feel the white-hot pain crushing his chest like a handful of dried twigs, and he was not there behind those eyes to see the world turn sticky and red and formless around him. Water in his lungs weighing him down, carrying him to the river bed, stirring up silt in deep waters where even the Sharingan could not make out the light playing over the river's smooth surface-_

"_How long has it been?" the boy said absently, back on the bank once again. It was not really a question. He trailed his fingers in the pale gold water, watching it slowly part around him like syrup._

"_We've been busy."_

"_I suppose. Especially you-" the boy looked up, quick jealous eyes bright for a moment in the dying sunlight, then it faded into only a look of mild pain. "They say you-"_

"_I know he asked you to follow me."_

_A sudden guilty look, not fast enough to feign denial before the Sharingan caught it. "Not like that," the boy protested, and then a pause, fingers curling in the water as he glanced towards the river, trying to find what he needed to say. "Only because he's worried." A longer silence stretching out between the inadequate words. "We all are."_

"_It doesn't matter."_

"_I'm sorry-"_

"_I know. It doesn't matter."_

_And somewhere where the river did not ripple like softly melting gold leaf, the surface fractured in a cluster of breaking bubbles as his last breath spilled out. The boy was dying down there. The current was turning him over in slow, lazy circles, skin scraping away against the gravelled riverbed, the water blushing red for one second before the blood was diluted too much to show. And perhaps he'd float, and perhaps he'd be caught up in weeds, more of them growing through his bones to tether him to the riverbed-_

_The riverbank in the boy's mind was turning patchy and gray now, and he was shaking his head, confused, blinking to try and clear his vision. It was not Itachi's fault. His illusion was flawless, but there was only a fading, oxygen-starved mind to receive it. The boy's thoughts were beginning to tumble together as though caught in that same current that carried him away._

_My eyes I can't see Itachi there's something wrong with my eyes-_

_You must have trained too hard._

_Yes we were training how long has it been I can't see Itachi-_

_I think you must be very tired._

_The boy's struggling mind seized onto those words, the meaning slipping from him over and over again as he tried to hold onto it._

_Tired very tired I am very tired_

_The riverbank greyed out altogether, red spots blooming like velvet in the darkness, and then there was nothing at all. And Itachi held the illusion for another minute while the dying mind turned aimlessly on itself in slow, goldfish circles, chasing thoughts that died out before they had formed. And Itachi knew dying wasn't so very hard, not like this. It could have been harder, but there was no need for the boy to suffer, it was only the death that mattered, the sacrifice-_

_The last few thoughts faded like sparks scattering into the river, and then he let the illusion slip. And then there was only Itachi on the river bank, and there was no boy, no summer afternoon, no river that ran like gold, and there would never be any of that again. Only him, only this dying grey day, only a corpse turning lazy circles through the colourless river-_

He reflexively touched his temple, the faint memory of old headaches stirring there. It had hurt, because he had done it all. He had wrote that suicide note through the boy's eyes and put him in the water, and he had created that other river bank, and it had hurt more than anything before, but it had to, it had to be a sacrifice-

Itachi was a murderer, with at least one death to his name. It did not concern him that much. He had already expected his crimes would be serious. If it had been minor, he would be imprisoned. If Konoha stood to gain nothing, he would be executed. That one, lonely death was not enough. It was clear from the features that the boy had been an Uchiha, but young, not old enough to have any real importance within the village. Konoha would not be so interested in such a small death, one that couldn't have mattered more to anyone else than it did to Itachi. There must have been other, greater crimes-

And there had been a reason for that death too, if he could remember it. He didn't remember if there had been anger or sorrow or regret, but Itachi did not think he would kill without any purpose. The boy had talked to him as a friend, maybe one that had grown uncomfortable around him, but not the enemy he might have been one day.

Itachi let it go. There were more important things to consider now.

Someone was coming to Konoha. It was something best left alone, for now. Even if they were his enemies, it would be an opening. Either they would die, or they would kill Kakashi, and at best, whichever survived may be injured or tired by their battle. It was best to wait for that opening, than to leave now and have perhaps both of them to deal with.

He went back towards the house. Clouds had clogged the horizon, and behind them, the sunset was the yellow and gray of old bruises. The snow was the same dust-grey in the fading light. There were not many sunsets left now.

"The two months are nearly up," Itachi said, pausing before he went to his room.

Kakashi nodded.

"Will they give you the order?"

"I expect so."

It did not trouble him, but Itachi did not wish to die.

He could not say why he wanted to live. There were things still undone, even if he couldn't name them. It was not because life was precious or because he feared death. There was no particular joy in living. It was sheer instinct that kept him alive, the same instincts that drove birds to take flight in flocks of thousand and to travel half the world before winter. As they could feel the heat draining from the air, he felt things stirring that still needed to be done. He did not know what Kakashi was living for, and what he would soon have to fight for.

"What do you have to go back to?"

"Missions," Kakashi said, absently. "The village. My team, if they ever return. Sakura. Naruto," he glanced at Itachi. "Sasuke."

_I don't think you should come into my room at night any more, Sasuke_

"Sasuke," Itachi repeated involuntarily, three syllables crashing through all the broken memories, and if he held on to them long enough, he might be able to find a way through them back to where it had all began.

"You remember Sasuke?"

"He was-"

_Important._ That was all he knew. It did not matter who he was. Sasuke could not die yet.

"Your brother," Kakashi supplied, after Itachi did not answer.

_Your clan is long dead. _

Water closing smoothly over the boy's head, a flash of red underwater that might only be light catching on fish scales, and they were gone. Those half-accusing words in his illusion. The conversation had never happened outside the boy's mind, but those words had been real even if he had died before they were ever really spoken. _He's worried. We all are. _He had killed an Uchiha, and it had not mattered so very much in the end.

"I killed them," It was not a memory, but a conclusion. The clan were dead. His crimes would be serious.

"Yeah," Kakashi confirmed, his voice neutral. "You killed them."

He saw Itachi turn minutely towards him, and shrugged. "It doesn't make much of a difference now."

It didn't matter if Itachi knew his crimes now. He would never go on trial for them either way, and there were only days left now.

"Why?"

"No one knows why you did it," Kakashi said. "You said it was to test your worth."

Except he had never believed that at all. The Uchiha clan had not all been shinobi. Itachi had not spared the children, the elderly or the weak. And the massacre had been quick and clean and efficient, most of the clan dead before they realised what was happening. Few of them had time to put up any kind of fight at all.

To test his emotional capacity, Kakashi had considered. If someone could kill their entire family, they could do anything. But that was all wrong too. There were perhaps two people in the clan that Itachi had still cared for, and neither of those had died in the massacre. Shisui was already dead, and Sasuke had been spared. The rest had been nothing to him.

There hadn't been as much talk afterwards as he would have expected, the village strangely subdued. They were all used to death, but there had been too many things wrong about this. They could handle war. It was easy to remember the fallen as heroes, and to look to the survivors and the next generation to find some purpose in the losses. There had been no sense and no gain in the massacre. And it had not been an outsider that they could easily blame. It had been one ninja, and one of their own, only thirteen years old, the age when most ninja were still genin running simple errands.

Besides, there had been too much to do. The entire policing system had broken down. There were so many corpses to find, to catalogue and to bury. There were survivors to look for, only to find that this must have been one of only a handful of nights when all the clan were within the village walls. And then there were funerals. How could they hold ceremonies for so many? In the end the village held one memorial service for most, and a separate funeral for Sasuke's own family. He would have sat, small and mute and shaken apart, through whatever they had decided on.

When the talk had began again, slowly, no one had any real answers. Itachi's actions had been more telling than words. Kakashi had never seen much of him, but he had heard the rumours beginning to spread until they even left the secretive, closed-in world of the Uchihas.

_There's something strange about Itachi_-

Itachi's father in a bar, once, after too many drinks. It was the only time he had seen the dignified Uchiha lose his composure. He had been looking impossibly old for some time, the shadows beneath his eyes beginning to spread like cracks opening up in granite. Someone congratulated him on Sasuke's entry into the academy. The look that had fallen over him was strange and weary, and the hesitation went on just a second too long. And later, he was still drinking, mumbling to himself, and he turned away with guarded eyes.

_-just not like Itachi_

And then there had been that encounter with Sasuke, that he had heard about. Kakashi did not know Itachi, but he knew his fighting style. Itachi did not seem to enjoy battle. He held his ground, countered if he had to, and always favoured the Sharingan and remote jutsu when he attacked. He could have disabled Sasuke before the boy had even got close. That he had attacked him, goaded him, used the Mangekyou Sharingan when it was unnecessary-

There was a purpose running through these encounters that Kakashi couldn't see, a pattern that even the Sharingan hadn't picked up. He shrugged, and turned away. No one he had ever fought had believed they were in the wrong. Everyone had their reasons. Itachi's were irrelevant now.

He watched the last of the gray light congealing into shadows, into the first of the final seven nights.


	10. Chapter 10

Felix Culpa

Author's Notes- Another two chapters uploaded at once, so if you've skipped straight to the last (as my stats page seems to be suggesting people are!), then click back to read chapter 9 first!

Like most people, I've always thought there was more to the Uchiha massacre than Itachi thinking it would prove how great he was if he murdered a clan he thought was useless, and that presumably included children and the elderly as well as some ninja. It would be nice to _know_ the reason before writing this, but then I might have to wait for weeks to update (and luckily the POV shift makes it unnecessary). Oh, and I have no idea whether electricity can be conducted in the way mentioned later, but then I don't think jutsu adheres all that strictly to the laws of physics anyway.

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No copyright infringement is intended and no profit is being made.

- - -

Little happened, but there was something quietly chaotic beneath the final few days. The Sharingan burned almost constantly between Itachi's eyelashes, with the uneasy glow of settled coals waiting to flare up into fire. Kakashi's single eye was lazy and unperturbed. Itachi watched the black treetops to see which would come first, Konoha or the others. Kakashi counted down the hours in the dull thuds of kunai.

An uneasy sense of purpose, of something left unfulfilled, ran through each day. Itachi still did not know what it was. Without memories, it had been reduced back to the level of the same basic instincts that made fish swim upstream, and birds migrate in winter. His fragmented memories still revealed nothing, save that he now knew the name of the boy, and how they were related. It meant very little to him. Itachi had not felt any animosity towards Sasuke in his dream, but then he had felt any real dislike for the boy in the river either, and that had not saved him.

He spent hours turning the name over, seeing what memories it may stir. _Sa-su-ke, _three syllables tumbling over and over into nothingness, the first link in a chain fallen slack long ago.

Itachi had tried to avoid the voices at first, in case they had been able to trace him somehow, but there was nothing to lose now. He couldn't consciously seek them, but he didn't resist either when he felt the pull of that broken, telepathic link. He caught six fragments of sentences over the last few days. Five of them were unrelated. The sixth-

_How far from Konoha?_

_A day._

They were close.

He did not leave. Itachi had committed a massacre within Konoha's walls. No matter who the voices came from, they could not be a more immediate threat than those in the village. And when they came, there would be Kakashi to get through first. He had acknowledged long ago that Kakashi would be a formidable opponent. He had only seen a few seconds of battle, but that had been enough, and he had suspected Kakashi had barely had to exert himself in that fight.

But then if he had killed his entire clan, he would be at least Kakashi's equal, and perhaps beyond. Itachi could still not remember how the massacre had gone. He turned over the images of how that night must have been. At least thirty or forty in the clan, perhaps as many as seventy or so. Excluding the children and the very elderly, almost all of those would be ninja. The Uchiha clan did not produce civilians.

He could picture it, vaguely, how it must have gone. The white fans that they stamped on every surface would be spattered red, blood sinking into stone to leave stains that would still be there today. The screams and smoke would bounce back silenced inside a genjutsu falling over the complex, locking in the slaughter like a glass killing jar. Hundreds of Sharingan would fade into the black smoky colour of blown lightbulbs, brittle and empty in the indifferent moonlight. Itachi pictured entire faceless families of pale, red-eyed ninja, killed them in his mind, and it was all nothing to him.

* * *

Two days to go, and Kakashi woke to an empty house. 

Something was different. He lay quietly in the greyish wash of dawn light, listening to the clotted silence, waiting for the things that would begin today. And then after a moment, he stood slowly, in no particular hurry, and eventually made his way to the back door.

It had been left open, throwing a trail of brilliant winter light inside the house. Kakashi followed it out onto the porch. Itachi was standing not too far away. A moment had passed before Kakashi realised there were no tracks around him, and the snow lay in soft unbroken drifts where the wind had carved it.

The snow had stopped, and the sky above was the smooth grey of wet concrete, as blank as the skies in Itachi's mind. The world outside was waiting for him, and Kakashi paused for a moment on the porch, listening to the near-silence. Something dull and remote creaked inside the house, but there was nothing there for him. After a moment, he stepped out into the soft and shapeless world that the wind had moulded, nothing but Itachi between the formless snow and sky.

Itachi looked no different. His stance was not aggressive. The Sharingan burned quietly like stoked coals, but his expression was impassive. He was standing in the snow, as though waiting, as though he had known that Kakashi would come this way.

Kakashi slowed down. A last three steps bringing him closer to Itachi, who did not move away or turn to face him. Without the wet flurry of the snow, it was oddly quiet, a thick and ominous hush waiting for the sounds that would break it apart into splinters. Itachi tilted his head, surveying the blank skies. His expression was distant.

"You remember?"

"Everything."

The Sharingan swirled around itself like a maelstrom of blood and shadows, like a gashed hole opening up into Itachi's mind. Three black blades sliced together to open up the full Mangekyou Sharingan like the tip of a drill.

Kakashi moved before he knew what was going to happen, behind the house and watching a glassy ripple of fire stream past, shimmering pale gold among all the black and white. A rush of heated air hit him dully, and when the fire faded, there was a smoking trench cut through the snow like a scar. The sides were sharp, the snow vapourised so quickly it had not even run to water.

He was calm. His heart had sped up, but only out of function. The adrenaline brought no sick panic, no dread. He had known this would come one day. This was what he did, what he had always done since before he could remember. It was what he would always do, and what would someday kill him. Kakashi tilted the forehead protector up, and watched the world snap into sharper focus through Obito's Sharingan. He could see a lot of things through the dead boy's eye, but he never saw the ghosts he may have expected.

Itachi would not be far away, but he could not see from here. A clone would be best, if he could spare the chakra. Better yet, two clones. He could send one either way around the house while he remained here, to see which way Itachi would come-

_Three_ clones, and Kakashi fumbled for it, found the handle, opened the door behind him without looking and stepped backwards into the house just in time to see flame ripple down before him into the snow where had had stood. Three clones would be best. One to go left, another to go right, and the third to go over the roof, because that was the way _he _would have come, and it was what Itachi had done.

And now they were in a stand-off. Itachi was not moving. The sound would travel straight through the skeleton of the house, if he tried to leave. There were no trees near the house. He would be too easily caught jumping down from there, unable to change course until he hit the ground. Except they were both trapped now, because wherever Kakashi left the house, he'd be easily visible from above. And he couldn't hit Itachi with a jutsu through the first floor and the roof.

He listened to the steady drip of water melting under the sudden heat of Itachi's flame, and the answer was very simple.

Kakashi moved quietly into the earth cellar, and sent a lightning jutsu directly into the metal and water that ran right through the house, through the entire pipes system up to the roof and the melting snow-water that streamed from it.

There was a sharp _crack_ and the world flared blue and white in an invert of itself. He waited while it faded, listening to the far-away soft thump before he began moving swiftly through the house, using the cover to work around to the other side without being seen.

Itachi had landed to the west, and Kakashi emerged towards the east side of the house, keeping close to the walls. He could get under the cover of the trees in a few seconds, but they offered little advantage. The bare branches would give no cover, and would shower snow at every movement. Every movement would stand out very clearly against the white and the black. It would be as much of a disadvantage for Itachi as it would be for him, except he would not last as long if they spent an hour or two moving between the cover of trees.

Kakashi let another minute or two slip away. No sounds came from the other side of the house. Itachi was waiting, and that was more like him. That first attack had almost caught him by surprise. Not the jutsu itself, but that Itachi had attacked at all, that Itachi had _followed _him when he had retreated. It had never been Itachi's style unless it was necessary, and it was rare enough to see Itachi really move that it had always come as a shock. Nothing so beautiful or poetic about it, just a sudden brutal dose of reality to see how fast people could come undone.

He waited, feeling his chakra slowly seep away in the whirl of Obito's Sharingan. Itachi only needed to keep his distance for a few hours, and he would win. Kakashi only had four shots at Chidori, and he would not be able to kill Itachi with any simple jutsu. If he needed to use a lethal attack, it would have to be soon.

After a minute, Kakashi slowly moved out around the side of the house, moving deliberately away from the shelter of the walls. There was no cover here, the house a little too far to his left, the trees too far to the right. Kakashi waited patiently. Itachi would be nearby.

When Itachi emerged, Kakashi let Chidori spark around his hand, watching the flurry of white light burn small holes into the snow. Itachi deliberately raised his hands before beginning to form the seals.

Kakashi could not risk looking up to read the movements. He had to assume Itachi thought the same way he did. That out here without shelter, it was worth using jutsu to kill- even jutsu that took time to prepare, or jutsu that could only be used once. As soon as Itachi began, he let Chidori fade into white sparks, and began forming seals again behind his back. _One. Two._ Itachi was faster and had a head start, but Kakashi only needed a very simple technique this time. _Three._

As the air streamed black, his earth jutsu broke through the ground and he fell into the cellar below.

It would have taken a stronger jutsu to break through frozen earth like this, and it would only have trapped him near the intense flame, just ten or twelve feet down where he would be roasted like an animal caught underground in a forest fire-

-except before leaving the cellar that ran right out under the house, he had flooded it with a water jutsu that had began crumbling the earth walls from beneath.

The weakened ground broke easily and he fell through the ruined roof of the cellar, something tearing a long raw patch up his arm, went straight to the bottom and held on there. Some of it had seeped away through the earth walls, but there were still seven or eight feet of muddy water between him and Amaterasu.

The water seethed behind him as he fell through it, the surface already churning away to steam. Seven or eight feet of water. He didn't know how fast the heat would work through it. Two seconds. Some floating furniture drifted into him, and blundered away like a blind sea creature. Three seconds. He could see nothing through the cloudy water, but the Sharingan could see the dense stream of chakra above, and he could feel the burn of it chewing through the water like something alive. Four seconds. His eyes began to burn as the temperature soared in seconds. Five seconds, and only two feet of water-

Five seconds, and the flow of chakra began to peel away as Itachi pulled back the black fire, and then he would see there was no-one there-

And it all depended on whether he was right, and whether there was a refractory period after using the Mangekyou Sharingan. Even just two or three seconds recovery time before it could be used again, and if Kakashi was wrong and Itachi had another lethal attack in him so soon, there would be no way to avoid it up this close-

Six seconds after he had broke through the ground, and he came up as the fire peeled away from around him, less than fifteen feet from Itachi. It was dangerous to use lightning jutsu when he was wet, but Chidori would be streaming _away_ from him, and if he was right, he would only need it once.

The air shimmered lethally hot around him, but Itachi's Sharingan had rearranged itself back into the normal pattern, and he didn't think he could control the black fire like this. Chidori sparked, like a handful of trapped lightning.

It took less than two seconds to reach Itachi, already shaping hand seals, but it was too late. Pain streamed backwards from the white fire he held. And then he was there, Itachi's face unreadable even through Obito's eye. The faintest change, something that wasn't a smile, more like a thin gash opening up into an expression even the Sharingan could not untangle, and Kakashi did not hesitate.

* * *

Kakashi dreamt for a very long time. 

His dreams were broken up, tumbling into each other like paper caught in a breeze. He existed in no particular place or time. He was nine years old, and his father was bleeding out into the garden. Thirteen, and Obito was talking to him in that strangely calm, hollow voice, watching him with a death mask crushed half in like papier mache. Nineteen, and in ANBU. A whisper to his left, _there's something strange about-_ and the Sharingan burned slowly in the porcelain, watching.

Sometimes things didn't go that way. Sometimes his father was never disgraced. Sometimes his father died before he was born. Kakashi was raised away from the ninja lifestyle. He pleaded for it a little, as children do, but soon forgot about it. He ended up in Konoha anyway, one of the civilians drawn to it and the comfortable lifestyle. He met Iruka. It was a good life.

Sometimes Obito survived. Sometimes they all died. Sometimes his whole team were dead, and sometimes they did not drift away one by one, drawn to better tutors than he would ever be. Kakashi went through them forever, trying on a hundred lives for size, until he forgot where he had began and where he had ended.

He woke up with a startle, and a sudden sense of dislocation, as though he had fallen from one dream into another. On the couch in the living room, but the room felt unfamiliar, as though he had returned from more than just sleep. The pale yellow light was all wrong too, as though he had slept for days. And before the dreams, there was-

It came back in a flood of hyperbright images that hit him hard. Out of the water that had nearly all steamed away, into heated air with all the oxygen burned from it. The fire had carved away to either side, still rippling gently like black gauze. Chidori had sparked into life, a thousand prickling pains streaming back from it as he used it while still wet. Itachi was too close and he must have known it, but there was nothing in his expression, no fear and no anger and no regret, nothing there at all. And when Chidori hit, Kakashi felt the electric snap right back through him, muscles suddenly going lax-

-and Itachi was down, black and red and white against the snow. Kakashi had never seen another Sharingan up so close. So red, as though Itachi was haemorrhaging somewhere, and nowhere else for it all to bleed out, trapped and clotting in the swirl of his eyes. The Mangekyou had formed too late, back into a kaleidoscope that trapped and twisted the world between its three blades. Then the Sharingan was fading, going to the dull, dusty colour of old stained glass, and then Kakashi realised there was nothing behind those eyes at all, and he was waiting for the explosion to come that would shred him into the clear winter air.

And then the clone was caving in and falling apart to scattering ravens, fluttering like torn scraps of paper, the air full of the dry clatter of their wings, and Kakashi was falling through them to land on his hands and knees in the snow. Then the _pain_ had come, as though the Sharingan had split open his head and drilled right through into the core of his mind, and even Kakashi didn't know what was waiting there. He had staggered into the house, sick and sore and scared.

Kakashi stood up slowly, arthritic pains racheting up from every joint. The pain in his head had dulled while he slept, but each step jostled it, stirring up like a nest full of wasps. He touched his face cautiously, and felt no dried blood, then carefully touched a fingertip to his closed eyelid. His vision in that eye flared suddenly white and black. It wouldn't open enough to tell what damage had been done.

The other bedroom had always felt empty. It did not seem to have changed since they had arrived. The air was dry and scentless and heavy with curdled silence. The only thing that had changed was Itachi's thin presence, not even enough to disturb the collecting dust, and now that was gone too, lifted like dew at the end of long nights.

Itachi was gone. After a while, Kakashi stumbled back out into the snow, and sat there waiting for them to come.

He pressed a handful of snow over the eyelid, the pain calming as melted water ran out through his fingers. The water was clear, not running pink from blood. Perhaps staring into a real Sharingan so close had simply burned it out to a clean and cauterised hole. The inside of his head felt scorched and clear, not an entirely bad feeling.

Kakashi wasn't surprised when the ANBU squad slid from the cover of the forest to the cover of the house, slipping like cats up to windows and doors. They ignored him, sat idiotically in the snow with his hand over his eye. He ignored them too, waiting until Tsunade cautiously broke cover. She was talking to him, but her eyes were fixed above his head, on the house.

"Is he-"

"Gone," Kakashi confirmed, and instantly, she was at his side.

"Are you hurt?"

"Just my eye-"

She tilted his head back, caught his wrist and moved it forcibly out of the way. Kakashi's eye still wouldn't open, but it did not matter to Tsunade. He felt her chakra seeping into him through his eyelid, cool against the raw tissue.

"There's no damage there at all," she said, moving her hand away and looking directly at him. Her expression was unreadable. Kakashi didn't answer, and after a moment, she released his wrist. He covered the Sharingan again, as though the small darkness cupped in the palm of his hand would stop the snowlight spilling in.

"I'm sorry," Tsunade said. "We came as soon as we heard rumours that an Akatsuki member was seen coming over the Wind border."

Kakashi tilted his head, and "Oh," was all he said. He wondered if Itachi had known that Akatsuki were nearby. He wondered if they had come to retrieve Itachi, or to silence him. He could wonder about these things a lot, if he cared to. It didn't really matter now any more.

"Is it worth pursuing him?"

"They'll already be over the border," And moving fast too, even if the Mangekyou Sharingan took as much out of Itachi as he expected. Teamwork. Itachi and his partner had worked well when he had encountered them that first time. They'd probably pass his bell test. He smiled at the thought. Tsunade gave him a strange look.

"Fine," she said, letting it go, turning to the forest. "You can come out now then."

Sakura broke cover first. She paused before Kakashi.

"Are you hurt?"

He gravely held up his grazed arm for her to admire. She flung herself on him in an unexpected hug. He remained still, unsure what to do.

"He isn't dead, is he?" Naruto looked unusually sober, eyes troubled and hands shoved in his pockets.

"No," Kakashi said.

"I thought if he died, Sasuke would have to come back," Naruto said. There was a pause.

"Well, you still have almost two years to kill him," Kakashi said, consolingly. It probably wasn't what Naruto really needed to hear. He thought it would do.

"Kakashi-sensei?" Naruto said, head tilted slightly. "Why are you sat down there?"

He shrugged, and stood up, then walked away after a moment. It seemed very busy all of a sudden. There were perhaps only ten people there altogether, but it felt like more, all of them swarming over the empty house. He did not expect they would find anything useful.

"I don't know how they followed us," Tsunade said, in a low voice. "The date your mission was to be terminated was always confidential information, and we only had a few hours' notice to get a team together after the Akatsuki sighting."

Over the Hokage's shoulder, Sakura had the grace to look a little guilty.

"Excuse me?" a hollow voice asked. An ANBU member held a piece of paper in a clear bag. "Is this your writing?"

It wasn't a threat, or a warning, and it didn't even explain so very much. Itachi had left a single line, not signed. His writing was as clear and stark as the black branches against snow.

_I killed Shisou for mine._

Kakashi shook his head. Tsunade turned to look at him questioningly. "Itachi killed Shisou for his what?"

"Sins," Kakashi said, the first thing that came into his mind. "Itachi brought up Obito before we fought."

He wasn't quite ready to give the real answer, and it was, after all, still speculation. Tsunade regarded him questioningly, and then shrugged.

"Are you ready to go back?"

He turned briefly to the house. There was nothing in there that he really cared to go back for. Kakashi shrugged, and turned away in the direction of Konoha. He turned the words over as he went.

_I killed Shisui for mine_.

_Shisui._ Another Uchiha. He had been Itachi's friend, perhaps his closest and only friend. They had all suspected the part he had played in his death, and taken it as fact after the massacre. And they had never known what Itachi had stood to gain from that one small death, but then when someone becomes a mass-murderer, people stop looking for new patterns, and now-

_Sasuke_. He could have came closer than he ever knew to killing Naruto. And if Naruto had been a little slower or little less lucky at any point in that battle, he would have died. Because Itachi had told Sasuke to kill Naruto, to kill-

Kakashi clapped his hand over the eye that was not injured at all, and felt the full Mangekyou Sharingan twisting on itself as everything fell together.

To obtain the Mangekyou Sharingan, one had to kill the person they were closest to.

_Everyone close to me is already dead_.

He hadn't killed Itachi, but he had not known it was a clone when he had moved to kill, and did Obito's eye know any different than what it saw? If Shisui had been pulled half-dead from the river, five minutes after Itachi had slowly turned and walked away, would that have made any difference? It was only circumstances. He would have killed Itachi. He would do it again.

"Kakashi-sensei?" Naruto was looking up at him questioningly. "What's wrong with your eye?"

Kakashi let his hand fall away, covering the eye with the forehead protector as usual. After a moment, he felt it slide back into the normal pattern of the Sharingan. A sharp twinge like a dislocating joint as the kaleidoscope untwisted itself, and he wondered what skewed world Itachi had seen, looking through it so long.

"New jutsu," he said. "I'll show you when we get back."

Satisfied, Naruto went bounding away into the treetops, maybe still hoping he'd find a trail to follow. Sakura carried on walking sedately besides him, Tsunade barking orders out not too far behind.

The snow was melting, Kakashi noticed, as they carried on into the forest. It never lasted long, in Konoha.


End file.
